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OTHER BOOKS BY DOCTOR MAINS 


RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE—Its Evidential Value 
FRANCIS ASBURY 
CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE 
JAMES MONROE BUCKLEY 
UNITED STATES CITIZENSHIP 
PREMILLENNIALISM 
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 


SOME MORAL REASONS FOR BELIEF IN THE 
GODHOOD OF JESUS 


MODERN THOUGHT AND TRADITIONAL FAITH 





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Lite’s Westward 


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Windows “— 


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By 4 
George Preston Mains 





The Abingdon Press 


New York Cincinnati 


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Copyright, 1925, by 
GEORGE PRESTON MAINS 


All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign 
languages, including the Scandinavian 


Printed in the United States of America 


TO FRIENDS I LOVE EV’RYWHERE: 
MANY ARE HERE; MORE ARE THERE. 


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CONTENTS 


L PAGE 
RORBWORD Db. cote s oil AS Cease ie Adin as Goes e 9 
Lirr’s WESTWARD WINDOWS............6--: 15 
SSA MITR TA 1h Ve A Cia ee Seatac ans Come ele ed 61 
Ways oF Least RESISTANCE................ 88 
Tur SOVEREIGN HEREDITY.................. 123 


A Srupy IN INSPIRATION ...........00ee000- 138 


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FOREWORD 


I HAVE grouped the papers of this volume 
under a common titl—Lire’s Westwarp 
Winpows. This title, that of the first essay, 
would seem fitting for the reason that these 
essays—with a single exception, and this one, 
in the meantime, having been revised and 
rewritten—have been composed since the 
eightieth anniversary of my birth. They are 
thus products of my latest thinking. 

The essay on Shamgar has in a way an ante- 
cedent history. In my early ministry, I 
preached a sermon on Shamgar which on sev- 
eral camp-meeting occasions especially was 
received with marked enthusiasm. The plan 
of this sermon was very elemental. I have 
never regarded it as having literary merit. 
Due, as I must think, to its illustrations coupled 
with a youthful fervor of delivery, it seemed 
to command a responsive popular hearing. 
In some way, the traditions of this sermon 
have followed me, and I have been recently 
requested by friends| to reproduce it in an 
essay. The lessons of the original sermon, 
now found in yellow notes, are chiefly pre- 
served in the essay. While I must think these 

9 


10 FOREWORD 


lessons in themselves wholesome, I cannot 
hope that, clothed in my more mature thought, 
they can strike the popular ear as when deliv- 
ered in my boyhood days. 

The two essays “Shamgar” and “Ways of 
Least Resistance,” lie on the surface of the 
world’s work-a-day life. They aim, in a 
serious spirit, to give some hints of the costs 
which must be paid by all who in life’s moral 
scheme would win for themselves character 
and worthy success. In the belief that there 
await true honor and high destiny for every 
clean-blooded and aspiring young life, for all 
who are willing to pay an honest cost for 
success, these papers are written in the hope 
that here and there some young readers may 
gain from them stimulus and reenforcement 
for a victorious facing of life’s duties and 
conflicts. | 

The paper on “Heredity,” a subject espe- 
cially of recent wide scientific interest, and 
whose demands upon life are one with the 
unyielding claims of the moral law itself, 
is prompted from not a little reading into 
this field of investigation. In this* essay I 
do not write as a scientist but simply as a lay- 
man much interested in the scientific treat- 
ment of the subject. In the interests of the 
democracy of learning, and to further healthy 


FOREWORD 11 


reactions of scientific truth upon popular 
thought, conduct, and character, I deem it 
no impropriety that now and then at least a 
lay mind should voice its own reactions to 
such moral lessons of nature as the apostles 
of science are continuously and in ever- 
enlarging measure contributing to the sum 
of popular knowledge. As the day has long 
since gone by when by ecclesiastical decree 
laymen are excluded from reading and dis- 
cussing for themselves the sacred Scriptures, 
so no more are the vital lessons of nature the 
cloistered possession of the laboratory. Science 
can have supreme value only as it ministers 
to the needs of the larger human life. It can, 
therefore, be no impertinence if occasionally a 
lay mind shall undertake to radio to its own 
larger circle something of the vital lessons 
which the ordained masters of science are 
teaching. 

The remaining papers—“Life’s Westward 
Windows” and “A Study In Inspiration’”’—are 
an attempt to deal, in a very fragmentary 
way, of course, with the impact upon my own 
thought of great intellectual movements which 
in my own day have commanded wide interest 
and acceptance in the world of scholarship. 
These two essays attempt no dogmatic finality. : 
They do not even ask from their readers agree- 


12 FOREWORD 


ment with their stated impressions and con- 
victions. They are simply chapters in a 
mental biography. In an entirely irenical, 
and certainly reverent mood, I have under- 
taken frankly to mirror my reactions to certain 
questions which have come to the fore in 
circles of the most competent and _ serious 
modern thinking. I claim no novelty and no 
originality for the views as set forth. I have 
mapped no new trails through the great spaces 
of thought. It has been my privilege to 
follow admiringly, sometimes wonderingly, in 
pathways already made luminous by epoch- 
making minds. I have occasionally had the 
privilege of lodging in the same camp, and of 
listening in, where the mighty have been in 
council. I have also lived long enough to have 
discovered a sympathetic and widening agree- 
ment on the part of many revered and scholarly 
Christian teachers with such views as these 
essays suggest. 

I do not for a moment assume that these 
essays utter any all-round finality of thought 
concerning the questions discussed. We live 
in a growing universe, a universe ever lifting 
itself away from our view into measureless 
immensities. Recent science has immeasurably 
widened our knowledge of nature, both in its 
microscopic and telescopic dimensions. But if 


FOREWORD 13 


this is true in the physical, in the lesser cre- 
ation, who shall give any forecast of the com- 
ing expansions of thought and knowledge in 
the roomier and enduring spiritual universe? 
The questions with which the essays now 
considered chiefly deal belong to a transcendent 
and ever-expanding world of thought. 

Of one thing I am confidently certain, 
namely, that the philosophical generalizations, 
and the scholarly reconstructions of history 
and of literature, which have come to so pro- 
nounced place in modern investigations, and 
to which these essays make so constant ref- 
erence, so far from unsettling or disturbing 
my Christian faith have brought great quick- 
ening and widening to my religious outlook. 
They neither dim nor confuse my religious 
creed. In lesser things there has been expansion 
of concept and perception, in some cases 
necessitating abandonment of not-vital views; 
but in the light of largest and most sane 
thought, as I apprehend it, the vital, the funda- 
mental questions of the Christian faith are 
emerging to immeasurable enlargement. The 
conceptions of God and Christ in creation 
and redemption are vastly enhanced upon 
illuminated thought. Man, the divineness of 
his destiny; Immortality, opening upon human 
vision vistas of infinite truth and blessedness 


14 FOREWORD 


—these are all framed for faith in the settings 
of measureless wonderment. Viewing it all, 
as I ean only most limitedly do, I can only 
exclaim with St. Paul: “O the depth of the 
riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of 
God! How unsearchable are his judgments, 
and his ways past finding out!” 

And so, looking out upon the narrowing 
margins that separate me from a nearing and 
mysterious hereafter, with a confidence un- 
faltering, I trust Jesus Christ to guide me 
safely across any dark spaces to the gateways 
of the Larger Life. . 


My earthly sun is far down in the West, 
My mortal years are nearing their goal; 

But a vision true of the Land that is best 
Inspires a fearless calm in my soul. 


I 
LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


BeuievE me: I know. There is no hour 
more choice than when, sitting against the 
background of all the day, one looks into a 
golden sunset. All other hours may have 
their charm and value, but the skies never 
wear a more brilliant glory than at the closing 
hour of day. 

Lingering as I do in these days by Life’s 
Westward Windows, I do not easily escape 
the reminiscent mood. Memories of the long 
years throng back upon my thought. By a 
secret telegraphy it is suggested to me that a 
long and active life may have at least treas- 
ured some values worth the giving to those 
who may come after. So, not, I hope, with- 
out some balanced sense of fitness for my 
younger fellow travelers, I am prompted to 
record, for whatever they may be worth, from 
the unwritten archives of memory, some phases 
of my own mental history. The paper follow- 
ing is intended in no sense to be a biography 
of deeds, but, rather, to voice a series of reflec- 


tions upon the creative causes and processes 
15 


16 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


which have entered into my own mental 
evolution. 
I 

And first I cannot too gratefully emphasize 
the moral values of my human birthright. I 
was born and reared in a quiet but godly 
home. My earliest memories are associated 
with my mother’s prayers, with her faithful 
instructions in Bible story and lessons; with 
a family altar where the reading of the Serip- 
tures and prayer were a daily nurture to my 
growing life. My general neighborhood sur- 
roundings were not always of- inspiring and 
helpful type. Many of my schoolmates came 
from irreligious homes: homes not creative of 
spiritual ideals. There was circuit preaching 
in the country schoolhouse, and there I at- 
tended a primitive rural Sunday school. Look- 
ing back through the years, I now see that it 
was the religion of my boyhood home that 
idealized my youth, that saved me from 
drifting into a commonplace and unaspiring 
life. In my boyhood home I experienced com- 
fort, but not physical luxuries. My early life 
was signally destitute of a thousand and one 
diversions which now make alluring appeal to 
youth. My parental home was a school of 
character. It was rich in domestic affection, 
alert in solicitude for my moral welfare, strong 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 17 


in the upstaying power of religious faith. I 
count this as the most decisively formative 
and controlling period of my moral history. 
I early decided for myself the Christian life. 
There was awakened, I do not know how, a 
longing desire for an education. This desire 
was confronted by many obstacles, by serious 
discouragements, some of them arising from 
adverse advice from my good circuit-riding 
pastors. This controlling desire, however, 
never deserted me. It carried me steadily on 
unto my final graduation from Wesleyan 
University. It is needless to say that my 
history, so far as it has moral worth, puts a 
supreme emphasis upon both the duty and 
value of religious training in the home. Not 
many parents can bestow upon children the 
patrimony of material wealth. But all parents 
can, if they will, bestow upon their children 
an infinitely more precious heritage—a sweet 
and consistent religious example and nurture. 
Every child born in a Christian land is im- 
peratively and supremely entitled to this 
heritage. Failure at this point is the most 
tragic failure in parental responsibility. It 
is the most precious heritage. possible to 
parental bequeathment. 


18 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 
iT 


On the fiftieth anniversary of Victoria’s 
reign, Tennyson, dedicating a poem to a 


“Queen, as true to womanhood as Queenhood, 
Glorying in the glories of her people, 
Sorrowing with the sorrows of the lowest,” 


characterized the period of her half-century 
rule as 


“Fifty years of ever-broadening Commerce! 
Fifty years of ever-brightening Science! 
Fifty years of ever-widening Empire!” 


This was a worthy tribute to a great queen 
and to a great age in British history. 

It has fallen to me to live through most 
years of, and many succeeding, the Victorian 
reign. In many respects these years cover the 
most remarkable period in the world’s history. | 
As no other, this period has been fruitful of 
great inventions. The electric telegraph, the 
steam railroad, the palace steamship, the auto- 
mobile, ocean cables, wireless telegraphy, the 
telephone, the phonograph, astronomical photog- 
raphy, spectrum analysis, electric lighting, gas 
ranges, the sewing machine, the typewriter, 
innumerable inventions promotive of agri- 
cultural efficiency, unnumbered appliances for 
the technical and malleable arts, and just now 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 19 


what would seem a crowning miracle of 
invention, the triumph of aerial navigation, 
as also that other marvelous achievement, the 
application of radio-activity to the instantane- 
ous transmission of speech and thought, en- 
abling millions of people sitting at their own 
firesides simultaneously to hear voices from the 
ends of the earth—all these, and, indeed, about 
every invention serving life’s practical needs, 
are the products of the period now considered. 

In the scientific control of nature no human 
age can be compared with this period. The 
demonstrated knowledge of nature is at least 
a hundredfold beyond that of any preceding 
equal length of time. The heavens to infinite 
and unimaginable distances are reporting their 
very substances to our telescopes and spectra. 
Nature on a descending scale down to infinite 
minuteness, a minuteness forever unseen by the 
unaided eye, and forever unimaginable to 
unscientific mind, is revealing its marvelous 
life and forms to microscopic vision. The 
sciences themselves, many of them born within 
this period, are multiplying in classification, 
from general division to subdivisions, each new 
department summoning to its work the investi- 
gating specialist. Im the ever-widening realm 
of science each day reports some new dis- 
covery, and it may be a discovery radically 


20 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


revolutionary of preceding theories, but all 
contributory to real knowledge. 

Beyond all present attainments our imag- 
ination is baffled when we reflect that science 
is as yet only in the prophetic morning of its 
achievements. It will push its inquisitorial 
advance until universal nature shall yield its 
last secrets, and pay its infinite tribute to 
human welfare. Science has already beyond 
measure enriched human thought, banished 
from whole realms the errors of ignorance, 
exorcised hoary superstitions, and has literally 
annihilated the specters, ghosts, and hob-. 
goblins of the former traditional mind. It has 
conquered dreaded diseases, mitigated the hor- 
rors of physical suffering, made surgery a 
skilled and beneficent art, given to medicine 
an ever-enlarging knowledge of diseases and 
their remedies, and transformed the very pest- 
holes of nature into regions of healthy and 
happy habitation. And this science shall 
pursue its widening and sifting search until 
finally all the dominions of nature shall join 
in its coronation triumphs. It is a chief agency 
of Providence for subduing and colonizing the 
earth, for making it a fit physical habitation 
for the sons of God. It is tragically and 
unspeakably true that evil men for evil pur- 
poses have subsidized the genius of science for 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 21 


the creation of inventions most destructive 
of civilization. But science itself will finally 
cure this. The time will come when war 
and its kindred traffies of evil shall be driven 
from the earth, when science shall assert its 
luminous sway over a peaceful world. 


II 

In the financial, mercantile, and industrial 
worlds the period of my life has been one of 
enormous transitions. In finance, through a 
monopoly of nature’s resources, national sub- 
. sidies to transportation enterprises, the cre- 
ation of vast corporate combinations, the 
aggregate material wealth of the age has 
grown to fabulous proportions. With this 
growth the world of merchandise on land and 
sea has kept even pace. Industrial proprietor- 
ship has passed from the democracy of small 
owners to the oligarchic corporation. The vast 
steel products, typical of highest corporate 
sway, are now ground out in the mills of the 
Titans. To these industries immense armies 
of labor, including men, women, and children, 
march daily to their monotonous tasks. These 
are the world’s wage-earners. 

This situation, intrenched on the one side 
in tremendous capitalistic strength, and, on 
the other side insistently protested against by 


22 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


organized labor, has created one of the most 
disturbing warfares of human history—the so- 
called warfare between capital and_ labor. 
To the disinterested observer it would seem 
that these two great forces are natural part- 
ners, that in a spirit of all mutual good will 
they ought to be federated together in a 
common amity and zeal of production. This 
irrational warfare has mangled the peace of 
civilization, has wrought untold ruin to indus- 
try, and a far worse moral ruin to society by 
its unethical standards of character and con- 
duct, by its breedings of dishonesties and 
hatreds, by its tragic destruction of human 
comfort. There are many prophetic signs of a 
better day to come—but at present the war 
still goes on. 


IV 

To what distance has civilization traveled 
from the jungle! To say nothing of lesser 
international broils, there have been waged in 
my lifetime no less than twelve destructive 
wars within the limits of what we call civil- 
ization. If nature can be thought red in 
“tooth and claw,’ what shall we think of 
human nature itself? Within these years 
civilization (!) has expended for the creation 
of destructive armaments sums sufficient for 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 23 


the planting and endowing of a great univer- 
sity in every state on the globe, for the giving 
to every municipality schools for the common 
enlightenment, for the adequate establishment 
in all lands of eleemosynary institutions, and 
for the strong founding of a Christian mission 
on every square mile of the globe—all this 
with liberal margins to spare! The last of 
the great wars, most destructive of all, was 
conducted in a spirit of malevolent ingenuity 
that would seem to outtax even the genius 
of Milton’s Satan. Our cherished optimism 
must not be blind to the fact that even civ- 
ilization itself seems menaced with annihila- 
tion. There seems indeed little room for 
optimism save as we can believe that above 
the destructive clash and the bewildering 
clouds of the present there stands the throne 
of a righteous and omnipotent Ruler of the 
world. O for the day when Righteousness and 
Peace shall kiss each other, and when the 
bells of human harmony shall be heard ring- 
ing around the whole earth! 


yi 


The picture is not all dark. This same 
period has witnessed the upgrowth of unprece- 
dented philanthropies, the founding and endow- 
ment of numerous institutions for popular 


24 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


enlightenment, an omnipresent press, the fruit- 
ful producer of great books, magazines, and 
the instant reporter of the world’s daily his- 
tory for all the homes of civilization. Christian 
churches and institutions have greatly multi- 
plied, and, in this period far beyond any other 
equal space of time, the agencies for a world- 
propagation of Christianity itself have been 
manifoldly created. Beneficent reforms, and 
on the widest scale, have been enacted. Insti- 
tutions of slavery have been driven from 
civilization. The Eighteenth Amendment has 
been added to the American Constitution. 
Notwithstanding all that is dark and atrocious 
in the world, there is indeed a growing “red 
of the dawn,” and 


“Prophet eyes may catch a glory 
Slowly gaining on the shade.” 


VI 

The creative thought of the period considered 
has been as fruitful and various as springtime 
growth. One of the most epoch-making move- 
ments in all the history of thought was the 
coming in of the Evolutionary Philosophy. 
On this topic I must be permitted to linger 
for a little. While claiming for myself no 
authority in science, my lay reading into this 
subject has wrought deep impressions upon 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS) 25 


my thought, impressions which, if not quite 
convictions, are closely akin thereto. The 
evolutionary concept is not new to thought. 
It is as ancient as Grecian philosophy. But in 
all justice, to Charles Darwin must be accorded 
the rank of chief modern apostle and ex- 
pounder of the evolutionary principle. Darwin 
was a very great man, doubtless the world’s 
most epoch-making thinker of the nineteenth 
century. Whatever oppositions have been 
aimed against his philosophy by small minds 
—and these have been many—England had 
the sane sense to bury him among her im- 
mortals in Westminster Abbey. 

Of course it need not be said that the term 
“Darwinism” is far from an exact synonym of 
the present-day “Evolutionary Philosophy.” 
Since Darwin’s revolutionizing book, The Origin 
of Species, was published three quarters of 
a century have been given to the study of 
evolution by the expert scientists of the world. 
The scope of the subject has been immeas- 
urably widened, and it has received myriad 
applications beyond anything of which Darwin 
originally dreamed. The principle itself may 
safely be said to be held, with negligible excep- 
tions, in the universal convictions of the 
scientific world. It must also be conceded, I 
think, that not only among Christian scholars, 


296 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


but among leading scientists themselves, there 
is the widely growing conviction that a con- 
trolling theistic purpose lies behind evolution. 
Evolution is the revelation and expression of 
God’s creative processes in the universe. 

The history of thought carries many mourn- 
ful chapters picturing the conflicts of ignorance 
as against enlightenment. All progressive 
movements of truth have encountered such 
conflict. The history of theology—treally the 
most significant of the sciences, the one to 
which all other knowledge with the progress 
of the ages will pay increasing tribute—is full 
of the crudities of limited, often bigoted, 
thought founded on baseless obsessions and 
most inadequate knowledge. The brunt of 
such criticism must not be borne by theolo- 
gians alone. Many enthusiasts, masquerading 
in the name of science, have proven them- 
selves just as impeachably narrow-visioned and 
bigoted as was ever true of any class of theo- 
logians. It must be admitted, however, that 
among religionists many have decried evolution 
whose knowledge has in no wise fitted them 
for appreciating its real character and scope. 
The misfortune is that this sort of mind has 
contributed largely to popular misconceptions 
and ill-judgments concerning evolution itself. 
The type of mind which refused to look into 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 27 


Galileo’s telescope would be ludicrously out of 
place in denouncing the solar spectrum. 

I frankly confess that the evolutionary 
philosophy, as now expounded in scientific 
thought, makes strong appeal to my credence, 
and, among others, for the following reasons: 

1. First, its universal acceptance by expert 
scientific mind. At this point, lest my position 
should be misconceived, I pause to emphasize 
the immeasurable values of the intellectual 
inheritance which the present has received from 
the past. It is only the pedantry of provincial 
conceit and of near-sighted vision which 
prompts to a berating of the treasures of truth 
and knowledge which have descended to us 
from the experiences and acquisitions of former 
generations. It is also true that the governing 
thought of the common mind is far more 
traditional than a creation of the present day. 
The common mind so pays tribute to the 
thought and customs of the past as to make 
exceedingly difficult the acceptance of new and 
revisionary knowledge by the masses of man- 
kind. But it must be equally emphasized that 
no new knowledge is ever destructive of proven 
truth which has come to us from the past, 
and of such proven truth the world has great 
wealth. 

It is not less true, however, that acquired 


298 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


knowledge grows from more to more. Growing 
discovery of truth is ever lifting thought to 
higher altitudes and to widening landscapes of 
vision. The pace of such discovery was never 
so rapid, the acquired knowledge of nature 
never so rich and bewildering, as to-day. But 
this rush of new knowledge forces vast revisions 
of traditional opinions in many fields of thought 
—revisions of opinion, let it be noted, and 
never the destruction of real truth, however 
anciently known. The new knowledge also 
widens the horizons of man’s thinking, and 
furnishes valid bases for new philosophies and 
for appropriation by the human mind of vast 
new provinces of truth, all necessitating ever- 
enlarging coordinations of thought. 

The fields of discovery are always first 
entered by the advance guard of thought, by 
the exploring pioneers of truth. And it is a 
necessity of the common mind, if it is to have 
any valuable knowledge of the new territories 
discovered, that it accept and trust the reports 
of these pioneer explorers. In all practical 
relations we accept and trust the testimony 
of experience in matters not originally known, 
much less discovered, by ourselves. Rela- 
tively, very few Americans have visited London. 
But the testimony of multitudes who have 
been there is so absolutely convincing that no 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 29 


one can doubt the existence of London. In 
most of life’s exigencies and perplexities we are 
absolutely dependent for safe guidance upon 
expert knowledge, knowledge which we do not 
possess for ourselves. We have a habit of 
relying upon and trusting such knowledge. 
If our business interests are confronted by 
legal uncertainties, we counsel with an expert 
lawyer. If we are physically ill, we seek and 
trust the skilled physician. So it is mere 
common sense that the thousands of expert 
students of nature in observatory and labora- 
tery should be trustfully accepted as our 
teachers concerning nature and her methods. 
If there exists for us any reliable guidance to 
a knowledge of the natural world about us, 
then certainly this knowledge must be fur- 
nished by these expert students of nature. 
They report to us that a new universe but 
recently unknown has literally come within 
the ken of their vision. Modern science has 
constituted a supreme court of authority for 
the interpretation of nature’s laws. If the 
judges on this bench do not know nature, 
then it would seem futile to seek for such 
knowledge elsewhere. But the master-minds 
of this court, without a dissenting voice, have 
declared the validity of the evolutionary prin- 
ciple. For my own part, I am unwilling to 


> 


380 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


enter an unknowing protest against the absolute 
invincibility of this verdict. I must believe 
that the body of science is as implicitly to be 
trusted in its own sphere as are my trusted 
teachers in other departments of thought and 
discovery. 

2. Asa concept, the Evolutionary Philosophy 
wondrously magnifies and glorifies God’s cre- 
ative and providential processes in the universe. 
The old teleology furnished vivid and eloquent 
testimony for the existence of God from 
evident design in nature. This science was 
called Natural Theology. To many minds, at 
first view, the Evolutionary Philosophy seemed 
quite destructive of any teleological evidence 
for even the existence of God. But this has 
given place to a vastly larger teleological view 
of nature. Evolution witnesses to us that from 
dateless beginnings, through unmeasured crea- 
tive eons, there has run one unbroken purposive 
process, the finality of which was the emergence 
of intellectual, moral, and creative personality— 
MAN. The scene of creation can no longer be 
confined to narrow historic limits. We now 
traverse an infinite universe whose unfolding 
has required something like an eternity of time, 
and all its creative processes, so far as we can 
measure, were directed to and subordinated to 
one end—the production of moral personality. 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS _ 31 


Against such a background let there appear 
as standing together the creative God and the 
worshiping human spirit, and we behold the 
most wondrous consummation of creative de- 
sign which the known universe has thus far 
yielded. . 

3. The Evolutionary Philosophy is morally 
and immeasurably prophetic. On the plane 
of higher and enduring values it is not a destruc- 
tive force. While unfit species and outgrown 
products fall into discard and oblivion along 
its path, it suffers nothing of permanent worth 
to be lost. The Epistle to the Hebrews pic- 
tures God as shaking not the earth only but 
also heaven, causing all things not enduring, 
all things transiently constructed, to be re- 
moved, to perish, that those things which 
cannot be shaken may be seen to remain. 
Evolution, on the widest scale, is a fulfillment 
of this prediction. The undying facts of the 
moral universe—God, Righteousness, Justice, 
Eternity, the Human Soul, with its unmeas- 
ured potentialities, its exhaustless capacities for 
knowledge, its infinite hunger which only a 
God can satisfy, Immortality, Love, the un- 
quenchable Moral Sense, the Good, the True, 
and the Beautiful—to all these and their kin 
evolution pays full tribute, and stands sleep- 
lessly on guard in their service. 


32 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


Concerning the deep spiritual experience and 
needs of human life—sin, guilt, a redeeming 
Saviour, pardon, conscious reconciliation with 
God, spiritual inspirations in the soul, divine 
reenforcement for life as against all assaults 
of evil—while concerning these moral deeps 
of life, evolution in itself may seem to have 
no very distinct or clear utterance, yet its 
spaciousness gives to them all ample shelter. 
Even for the human body, the earthly and 
finally perishable residence of the immortal 
spirit, evolution seems to be working an ever 
and improving tenure of health and comfort. 

If, now, from these fundamental bases we 
turn our vision to the future, we have no 
measuring rod, no optics, by which to estimate 
uplifts of destiny to which evolution shall 
bring our humanity. The infinities of knowl- 
edge have only begun to be explored by the 
human mind. God’s processes both in the 
material and spiritual universe are as yet only 
elementarily understood. God’s nature itself— 
for which the soul has such inborn affinities, to 
which it has such exhaustless capacity for 
assimilation—is known only as the first touch 
of dawn as compared with the full noonday 
which is to come. Evolution awaits God’s 
ages, and God’s inworking genius, for the ful- 
fillment and perfection of its mission. And all 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS — 33 


this only faintly points to a few guide-marks 
along the march of God’s fulfillment of himself 
in the future exaltations of his human chil- 
dren. 

The Divine estimate of man’s supreme im- 
portance and worth appears in the fact that 
the crowning end of all the eonic and dateless 
creative processes is seen in the production of 
a moral personality. God’s purpose and dealing 
with man are not to be construed as a transac- 
tion occurring between the morning and eve- 
ning of any earthly day. God took a long 
section of eternity in preparation for man’s 
coming. He can afford to, and he will if he 
so elect, take still unmeasured time for the 
future schooling and development of his moral 
sons. 


“But if twenty million of summers are stored in the 
sunlight, still ; ; 
We are far from the noon of man; there is time 
for the race to grow.” 


4. In this roomy view of evolution there is 
space not only for a most prophetic outlook 
upon man’s future, but as well for a most 
kindly consideration of what may be conceived 
as intellectual and moral limitations in our 
fellow men. Most of the acid conflicts which 
engender cleavage and bitterness between men 


34 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


and men, between parties and parties, are the 
outgrowth of different points of observation as 
occupied by opposing parties in the conflict. 
While it is true that all men are more or less 
fragmentary thinkers, it is equally true that 
some men, and groups of men, on the path- 
way of their mental and moral evolution have 
advanced farther in knowledge and moral vision 
than have other men and other groups. There 
are multitudes of men who are belated in their - 
mental and moral march. These retarded 
groups, however, should neither be spurned nor 
intolerantly judged by those who have ad- 
vanced to higher and more luminous territories 
of thought and character. 

Two shaping and vital factors in evolution 
are heredity and environment. Of the two, 
while both are indispensable, environment is 
the more revisional. No organic life can long 
survive without a fitting habitat. The fish 
cannot live out of water. The eagle could 
not survive in the sea. Most organic life be- 
low man has little or no genius for a prompt 
construction of new environments. Changes in 
climate, lack of food supply, or escape from 
enemies have forced emigration of many lower 
orders to new conditions in which gradually 
they have taken on new adaptations to foreign 
surroundings. This process, however, is usually 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS — 35 


attended by extinction of the migrant. It is a 
working law of nature that life, in order to 
self-perpetuation, must harmonize with its 
environment. 

Now, what is true of organic life is just as 
true of thought concepts. No theory or hy- 
pothesis can long survive outside of a mental 
environment fitted to its own quality. A 
distinctive hall-mark of man’s creative per- 
sonality, a quality that separates him by 
impassable gulfs from all lower orders of life, 
is that he has the genius for creating his own 
environments. He modifies surrounding nature, 
gives new combination to its laws, and makes 
himself in the material world a citizen of 
hitherto uncreated realms. But his most 
wonderful creations are those of his thought- 
world. From the day when he began to be a 
thinker, man has been busy in constructing 
systems of philosophy, of mythology, of theol- 
ogy, of poetry, of science. While giving un- 
stinted justice to the systems of past thought, 
yet most of them, owing to the limited knowl- 
edge and lack of vision of the ages which pro- 
duced them, were but imperfect embodiments 
of the truth. In the meantime new discoveries 
of truth have come in. Knowledge has widened, 
and discerning minds have been forced either 
to abrogate or to make large revisions in the 


36 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


older thinking. The general fact, however, is 
that the new enlightenment is known and 
accepted only by the advanced discoverers and 
thinkers. It results that, in general, among 
rational beings there are two classes—the pro- 
gressives and the traditionalists in thought. 
Traditionalists are always in the majority. 
There is a wide inertia in intellectual beliefs. 
The many, without much consideration of or 
anxiety about the matter, are smugly content — 
to walk in paths of thought and custom trodden 
by their forebears. On the path of history 
there are two—and more—groups of thinkers: 
the scouts of discovery who are ever pioneering 
paths to new knowledge and wider thought; 
the stand-patters who are content to dwell in 
the static camps of conservation and tradition. 
The one is constantly reconstructing and ex- 
tending the frontiers of thought; the other is 
hedged within the environments of tradition, 
and often with a backward look. These two 
types of mind do not coalesce—they do not 
dwell in the same mental world. 

But all this is far from saying that God’s 
good people may not be dwellers in either 
camp. Scientific knowledge is not coextensive 
with nor inclusive of the conditions of saint- 
liness. In the breadth of God’s redemptive 
administration there is opulent room for the 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 37 


humble and unlearned, for those who know 
little or nothing about the historic and scien- 
tific ranges of knowledge, to be themselves 
the possessors of white-souled Christian char- 
acters. One may be scientifically, even stub- 
bornly, wrong in much of his intellectual 
beliefs, who yet at his moral center carries a 
martyrlike integrity of saving faith. This 
concession, of course, is infinitely far in pur- 
pose from discounting or cheapening the high 
values of correct beliefs. Accurate and full 
knowledge, in so far as it may be attained, 
is of measurelessly greater value than precious 
pearls. 

In the light of basic and vital values, the 
controversy just now so conspicuously rife as 
between “Fundamentalist”? and “Modernist” 
Christians would appear to carry in itself 
much that is unseemly, intolerant, and dam- 
aging in spirit. It seems a pitiable diversion 
from and a discreditable neutralizing of ideal 
Christian unity and service now so pressingly 
needed for the universal world. It may possi- 
bly result that, at what would seem the cost 
of a big price, there may come a larger world- 
harmony of Christian thought. ‘The decisive 
fact is that these two schools are differently 
thought-environed. Each of these schools 
contains many high-minded and sweet-minded 


88 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


Christians. Both may be credited as holding 
large measures of truth. Each may be in 
error at many points. But obviously, in broad 
and vital soundness, they cannot both be 
creedally right. In the measure in which 
either ignores the demonstrated findings of 
scientific investigation; adheres to superseded 
constructions of ancient prophecy, holds to a 
static universe, teaches that God’s self-revela- 
tion to man is complete and forever closed— 
by so much would this school of thought be 
in fatal conflict with the mightily growing 
philosophical and scientific convictions of the 
age. It is not, however, to be wondered at 
that this type of mind as thus indicated is 
numerically large. As has already been said, 
the average mind is traditional. It is not 
expert in history, and it is largely uninformed 
in philosophical and scientific thought. It 
dwells im a thought environment that has 
come down from an unscientific age, an environ- 
ment stubbornly resistant especially against 
the approaches of new concepts in religious 
thought. ‘This mass mind is greatly subject 
to emotional sway by eloquent, though ignor- 
ant, denunciations of any better intellectual 
or knowledge world than that into which itself 
was born. Its faith is shaped by an inherited 
intellectual environment, an environment which 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS — 39 


will persist until the merciless publicity of 
demonstrated truth, the Thor hammers of 
better thinking, shall break down the environ- 
ment itself. 

In the meantime we are living in an age of 
vastly growing knowledge, an age in which 
the most expert scholarship is carrying a 
searchlight into all the highways and byways 
of history, an age in which from a thousand 
observatories and laboratories there come in 
upon us the daily heraldings of new discoveries 
in the immensities above us and from the 
microcosms at our feet. The inquiring mind 
of this age, as in no age preceding, is urged 
by a passionate love of truth, all truth so far 
as it may be gained in earth or sky or sea, 
and nothing but the truth. One outcome is 
certain. Whatever may be the truth or error 
in any present system of thought, in a world 
where discovery travels on the wings of elec- 
tricity, where nature, as never before, is yield- 
ing its inner secrets, where devout and expert 
minds can rest only in the seats of ascertained 
knowledge—in such a world as this false 
philosophies, and theories untrue to fact, how- 
ever hedged in by traditional environment, 
cannot finally stand against the focused intelli- 
gence of mankind. 

That this irresistible inquisition for dis- 


40 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


covery of all ascertainable truth will just as 
certainly uproot the errors of religious as well 
as of scientific thought is only to state an 
obvious truism. For the religion of the future 
this fact is most crucial. Traditional limita- 
tions of religious truth will yield with stubborn 
slowness. For a long, long time to come there 
will be belated groups, whole provinces of 
them, on the pathways of religious knowledge 
and progress. ‘The world is now training a 
generation of young minds which will soon 
take direction of its affairs. In all its higher 
schools this young generation will be trained 
to face frankly all demonstrated truth. This 
generation will acquire a habit and appetite 
for truth alone as none of its predecessors. 
The age is closing when unfounded credulity 
can hold place in any department of thought. 
The church which in the near or far future 
shall win the world to Christ must, from high 
nave to lowest level, in pulpit, choir, and 
altar, in cloister, aisle, and pew, be lighted 
with the light of God’s own truth alone. 


Vil 
There has come up within my own age 
another great intellectual movement which has 
effected grave, and, it must be said, disturb- 
ing, revisions of time-honored beliefs. This is 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 41 


the scientific development of the historical and 
literary construction of the Bible. If accurate 
and conclusive knowledge of any historic 
thought-movement must be rated as of high 
value, then within this classification, there is 
no result entitled to higher valuation than the 
constructive products of modern scholarship 
toward a commanding knowledge of the genesis 
and development of the biblical literature. It 
may be decisively said that the literature of 
the Bible, taken in its entirety, and for all 
its history, was never so perfectly known in 
scholarship as now. This beneficent result has 
come about chiefly through a reverent but 
fearless application by scholarship of the 
inductive philosophy to biblical literature. The 
method, instead of sitting apart and forming 
a prior, academic theories of what the Bible 
ought to be, has been to interrogate the Bible 
directly concerning what it has to say for 
itself as to its own origins, growth, and mission, 
To this end there have been concentrated upon 
biblical history and literature the searchlights 
of the world’s most scholarly and mature 
constructive criticism. There has been a per- 
sistent, perhaps prevalent, tendency in con- 
servative thought to give the Bible such high 
rating in sanctity as to make it a sin to approach 
it by processes of human criticism. To such 


42 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


a sentiment, it seems to me, a sufficient response 
is that the Bible, as other ancient products, 
has come down to us as a body of literature. 
This literature has been mediated to us through 
human minds and by human processes. Its 
availability as a medium of information, how- 
ever sacred such information may be in itself, 
has come to us from man-made printing presses. 
It is a literature which has a human history. 
It is designed to appeal to our human intelli- 
gence. Within these limits nothing would 
seem more legitimate than for scholarship to 
attempt the most perfect knowledge possible 
of all the human features of the Bible. If it 
is necessary to have any rational understand- 
ing of the Bible at all, then the more perfect 
this understanding the more valuable is our 
possession of the Scriptures themselves. To 
believe less than this is puerile. There can be 
no rational process with a more valid moral 
vindication than for reverent scholarship to 
seek all possible knowledge of the biblical 
literature. The most perfect human knowledge 
of the vestures of truth can never work any 
damage to truth itself. 

It is the function, and only legitimate func- 
tion, of criticism to recover, so far as is hu- 
manly possible, to us the exact texts, the 
order of their production, the dates and 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS = 43 


environments of the biblical literatures, sources 
and the combinations of their material, their 
numerous and varied revisions, the meanings 
and purposes of their records. Such a function 
in the end can only produce a clearer discern- 
ment of and a more intelligent and reverent 
adherence to whatever there is of divine 
revelation and sacred truth in the Bible itself. 
The science of biblical criticism is, like all 
other sciences, progressive. In its advancing 
path it is constantly yielding, and will continue 
to yield, new measures of valuable knowledge. 
The Sacred Scriptures, the more they are 
investigated, like the sidereal heavens, are 
found increasingly crowded with revelations of 
the Infinite. 

Christian life and creed are not synonymous 
terms. Spiritual life in the soul comes alone 
from moral harmony with God. Creed is a 
product of intellect. Its validity must be 
based upon knowledge. But knowledge is 
ever growing, hence creeds are ever subject 
to revision in the light of larger knowledge. 
There are many realms of knowledge upon 
which it is impossible for the intelligent man 
of to-day to think upon certain subjects just 
as his father thought before him. Loyalty, 
however, to our own mental constitutions, 
God-given, compels our intellectual allegiance 


44 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


to the truth as best we are now able to under- 
stand it.! 


“Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing 
purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the 
process of the suns.” 


“The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 
And God fulfills himself in many ways, 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” 


Vill 

The supreme question centers in Jesus 
Christ—in the meaning of his person and 
mission. No other character has been so 
much studied, so much discussed, as Jesus. 
This fact has been greatly emphasized within 
the period of my own life. When I first be- 
came a really interested student of the Gos- 
pels, the ground swell, phenomenal in itself, 
of scholarly interest as awakened by Strauss’ 
Infe of Christ had not yet subsided. Baur’s 
indefatigable and acute studies of Gospel 
sources were still of living interest. Renan’s 
Life of Christ, written in the spirit of a romance, 
attained most wide publicity. Then came in 
order Ecce Homo and Ecce Deus, each com- 
manding a wide study. Lux Mundt, a series 





1 The subject of this section is rich and alluring in both fact 
and suggestion; but to pursue it in detail would take us too 
far afield for the purpose of this essay.—G, P. M. 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 45 


of papers written by brilliant Oxford scholars, 
duly appeared. After these I name as a few 
from the many studies of Christ, lives or 
discussions by Edersheim, Geikie, Farrar, Fair- 
bairn, Sanday, Forsythe, Denney, and finally 
Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historic Jesus. I 
have read and studied all of these books. I 
carry in myself neither desire nor conceit of 
ability to discount the value of these works. 
Most of them are really great—all of them of 
high order. They have brought to me a rich 
fund of information and inspiration. But 
still I have more than ever the feeling that 
anything like an adequate life of Christ never 
has been, and never will be, humanly written. 
Mature study of the four evangelists has 
increasingly impressed me that these very men, 
some of them intimately companioned with 
Christ as his chosen disciples, in preparing their 

records, were dealing with a Character that im- 
- measurably transcended their understanding. 

I may confess that at my present age I 
am not so much a dogmatic theologian as in 
my earlier ministry. Then my theology was 
quite architectural. It was constructed pretty 
much from patterns selected from manufac- 
tured systems. I treat with no slighting pen 
this early situation. I was as serious then as 
I am now. But standing, as I do now, on the 


46 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


summit of the years, my perspective is far 
wider and different, and, I must think, corre- 
spondingly more valuable. The boundaries of 
my thought, like the Copernican as compared 
with the Ptolemaic astronomy, have been 
pushed far out into the spaces. | 

It seems quite probable that Saint Paul 
intellectually was never fully emancipated 
from some of his earlier rabbinical views. Be 
this as it may, I can have no doubt that he 
had at least large inspirational glimpses of the 
cosmic meaning of Christ when he declared 
that God “raised him from the dead, and set 
him at his own right hand in the heavenly 
places, far above all principality and power, 
and might and dominion, and every name that 
is named, not only in this world, but also in 
that which is to come, and hath put all things 
under his feet.”” Or, again, when he says: 
“For by him were all things created, that 
are in heaven, and that are in the earth, visible 
and invisible, whether they be thrones, or 
dominions, or principalities, or powers: all 
things were created by him, and for him: 
and he is before all things, and by him all 
things consist.” 

The deistic philosophy, much in vogue in a 
preceding century, gave to God a classification 
little better than that of a mere mechanician 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS = 47 


in the universe. This philosophy is now out- 
worn and bankrupt. There can be no doubt 
that the trend of best thought is setting toward 
a spiritual interpretation of the universe. 
The philosophy of divine immanence in crea- 
tion coupled with the concept of divine tran- 
scendence above all physical phenomena, is 
being increasingly installed in thought. So 
far as physical phenomena are concerned, they 
are but the outer robe of the spiritual creation 
and the indwelling life of nature. Doctor 
Jack’s little but widely read book, The Living 
Universe, is but a modern testimony to this 
growing belief. 

The fact, however, of chief significance in a 
world of both growing spiritual concepts and 
of scientific knowledge is that Christ more 
and more emerges not only as a Being of 
historic but of cosmic centrality. The cross 
of Golgotha, of measureless significance in 
itself, is but a visible scene in the moral drama 
of the universe and of eternity. The history 
and meanings of the incarnation are too deep 
to be humanly fathomed. Christ is too large a 
subject for human measurement. He belongs to 
the Infinite. While we may apprehend enough 
of his mission for the meeting of all our spiritual 
needs, his transcendent significance will remain 
forever unmeasured by finite thought. 


48 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


Christ, both in history and theology, has 
been mostly dealt with in sections fragmentary 
to his wholeness. In one era he has been 
extolled as Deity; in another he has been 
limited to the mere genus homo. We must 
ascribe to Christ a complete humanity. If his 
being did not include all that belongs to 
normal human nature, then by so much will 
men be unable to find in him a satisfying 
Saviour, a perfect Exemplar and _ sufficient 
Helper in the trialsome turmoil and tempta- 
tions of human life. Failure here would mark 
the defeat of Christ’s incarnate mission. Hu- 
man nature, if it is ever to be uplifted and 
transformed into a divine realization, needs 
imperatively to have the way to such realiza- 
tion pioneered by some exceptional and fault- 
less Leader who himself has traversed all the 
distances of human life, has been smitten 
with its temptations, tested by its trials, 
confronted by its obstacles, borne the burden 
of its toils, has yielded to no evil, has at no 
point failed of duty, who has perfectly exem- 
plified both the needs and the value of sacri- 
ficial service for mankind, who has surmounted 
all heights of difficulty and who at the end of 
his human life, without a single backward step 
or lapse from an ideal rectitude, is able to 
place his own white hands in the hands of 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS $49 


God, who will hail and crown him as the 
triumphant Captain of human salvation. It 
is as little as can be said that Jesus Christ 
alone, of all historic characters, supremely, 
perfectly meets these measureless needs of 
human nature. 

Much has been both said and written, for 
instance, in assumption of Christ’s limitations 
of knowledge as necessitated by his human 
nature. Such limitations are unhesitatingly 
implied and accepted in the Gospel narratives. 
He was born a human infant. It is distinctly 
declared that he grew in stature and in wis- 
dom. His environments were provincial, his 
teaching, such as came to him, traditional. 
There is no evidence that he was widely 
versed in world history or that he was familiar 
with the facts of modern science. In matters 
of ordinary and nonmoral knowledge he was 
a citizen of his day and of his province. He 
distinctly disclaimed for himself a knowledge 
of some future events. These limitations were 
such as would properly belong to his function 
as a perfect Exemplar of human life and 
character. Frankly, this is one of the ques- 
tions that cannot be faced without involving 
mystery too deep for our solution. Mystery, 
however, in itself is no abrogation of fact. 
The question itself is probably made difficult 


50 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


more from our own limited discernments than 
from any other cause. The question of Christ’s 
possible limitations of knowledge is not, and 
cannot be, more mysterious than are many 
other phases of his known mentality. Christ 
was never once betrayed into moral error of 
thought. The absolute clarity of his moral 
vision never once failed him either when his 
foes sought to put his conscience in dilemma 
or ‘when he was in the presence of evil tempta- 
tion. The chief wonder is that any human 
life should prove itself so morally infallible, 
so all-commanding in moral and_ spiritual 
realms. The ages have passed, and in the 
meantime great philosophies have emerged and 
disappeared, great institutions have arisen and 
perished, great civilizations have come and 
gone; but in this twentieth century away from 
Christ he stands incomparably the moral and 
spiritual Leader of mankind. Enlightened 
thought is attracted to him as never before. 
He arrests and holds the most serious thought 
of this enlightened age as the one peerless 
paragon of human perfection. He walks the 
earth as the one perfect Man. All possible 
moral progress can never transcend him. The 
ideal future of humanity must itself be shaped 
and perfected after the standards of his own 
character and thought. 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 51 


Thus far, however inadequate our appre- 
hension of the Subject, we have sought chiefly 
to indicate at least a few features of Christ’s 
peerless human excellence. If we were to 
conclude here, this picture at best would be 
utterly one-sided. The surpassing wonder and 
glory of Jesus Christ inhere in his divine 
relationships. Before the worlds were made 
he dwelt in the bosom of the eternal Father. 
The guarantee of Christ’s adequate power to 
become the Redeemer and Saviour of our 
world lies back of all human history. The 
incarnation was not a conception born as an 
after-thought. From eternity it was a fore- 
east of God’s purpose of self-revelation to a 
coming humanity. Whatever its remedial 
relations to human sin and guilt—and these re- 
lations cannot be overemphasized—the incarna- 
tion was preordained as a very chief method of 
God’s own self-revelation to man.. It was a 
supreme translation of God himself in terms of 
man’s moral, spiritual, and affectional apprehen- 
sion. It was not less the imaging forth of God’s 
own ideal as to man’s moral kinship with him- 
self. In Christ’s primal relations to God, the 
Father, we must find the largest and deepest 
meaning of Christ himself. Without attempt to 
give mental construction to the mode of these 
relations, Christ stands in transcendent rela- 


52 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


tions to both God and man. He not only 
presents in himself the highest ideal of man, 
but. he has given to man the most inspiring, 
the most satisfying conceptions of God that 
have ever come into human thought. The Being 
that could thus put God’s picture into the human 
heart must himself be something more than man. 
No merely human genius could ever have created 
this picture. Much less could any man have 
put such a portrait of God into human thought -» 
to hold mankind in an ever-increasing captiv- 
ity with the passage of the centuries. Christ 
has furnished a picture of God which only 
a godlike Artist could have produced. In such 
a relation I cannot think of Christ as merely 
a Man. He is as certainly divine as human. 
If asked for a psychological explanation of the 
facts, I can do no better than to answer in 
the words of Saint Paul, when in a kind of 
mystic rapture, he declared: “Yea, and with- 
out controversy great is the mystery, the 
profundity of Divine truth, in our religion: 
he was revealed in flesh; he was vindicated 
by the Spirit; he was seen by the angels; he 
‘was proclaimed among the heathen; he was 
believed on throughout the world; he was 
taken up into glory.” 

If evolution, as seems probable, shall be 
finally accepted as God’s creative method in 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS _ 53 


the universe, Christ will still be found central 
to it all: he will insoul evolution itself with a 
divine immanence. If God works by evolu- 
tionary processes, the chief end—not in a 
chronological but in a spiritually creative sense 
—toward which he works must be moral, not 
the physically organic. Under any hypothesis, 
the chief product of evolution must be moral 
personality. However invisible to us the divid- 
ing lines, evolution makes place for decisive 
upward departures. There are gradations all 
the way from the mineral to the most ele- 
mental organic structures, and thence still 
upward to mental intelligence and to moral 
personality. Organic evolution develops under 
environment, and its perfect final product can 
be looked for only at the teleological end of the 
process. Different from products on lesser 
planes, moral personality is evolved only in 
response to the stimuli of ideals and inspirations 
which originate in a morally creative Source. In 
God’s fullness of time the period dawned when 
man became susceptible to moral training and 
spiritual transformation under the inspiration 
and urge of moral ideals. It was then when 
God, under the forms of types and shadows, 
and through prophetic voices and _ historic 
leadings, entered upon the moral schooling 
of mankind. At a riper stage of the prepara- 


54 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


tion God gave the fuller and imperatively 
needed revelation of himself in the incarnation. 
He hath spoken to us in the person of his Son. 
Whatever may be Christ’s genetic relations to 
the evolutionary process, he is the embodiment 
of its highest purpose. Evolution in its final 
outcome is the working out of a divine union 
between God and man. Christ is the chief 
Actor, the one creative Force, inthe working 
out of this cosmic climax. The deepest 
moral need of humanity was for a_ visible 
revelation not only of God, but a revelation 
also of its own possible final spiritual status 
and destiny as contemplated in God’s purposes. 
The incarnation fully meets this need. Christ 
was made flesh and dwelt among men, 
that they might not only look upon the 
Father’s glory, but as well that they might 
see the glory, and feel the inspirations, of their 
own possibilities as the coming sons of God. 
Christ is the Creator of evolution, not its 
product. If he were the product, he could 
only appear at the end of the process. He 
appears midway in the scene, that by his 
example and teaching he may accelerate the 
moral and spiritual evolution of the race.! 





‘This general thought is very forcibly developed in Dr. J. 
Y. Simpson’s recent great book, Man and the Attainment of 
Immortality. 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS _ 55 


Whether this evolutionary conception will be 
found finally to harmonize with Christ’s in- 
finite divine mission I, of course, do not know. 
I can only feel that it is a conception that 
awakens great largeness of view. It immeas- 
urably widens the horizons of man’s vision 
concerning the meaning of Christ for the 
moral universe. It seems a view that opens 
vistas of infinite wonderment upon God’s aims 
and processes in creation. It gives to Christ 
a significance immeasurably beyond that of 
any mere historic episode in human biography. 
It seems a view harmonizing with Saint 
Paul’s ascription to One whom God raised 
from the dead, and whom he has set at his 
own right hand, far above all hierarchies, 
authorities, powers, and dominion, to whom are 
given all titles greater than can be bestowed 
either in this world or in the world to come, 
under whose feet God has put everything and 
made him to be the Head of the church, which 
is his Body, a body filled by Him who fills 
everything everywhere. 

And such are some of the impressions of 
Christ’s ever-unfolding and ever-incomprehen- 
sible character which abide with me in life’s 
late afternoon. I am unable to think of Christ 
as anything less than God’s Deific Son, as the 
one only Redeemer and Saviour of mankind, 


56 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


as the one central Figure who shall attract to 
himself the song and worship of all coming 
ages. I am unable to think that Christ’s 
completeness can ever be expressed in terms 
of formal creed. He infinitely transcends the 
possibilities of such measurement. I find 
myself rather in sympathy with Gilder’s “Song 
of a Heathen.”’ 


“If Christ Jesus is a man,— 
And only a man, I say 
That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
And to Him will I cleave alway. 


“If Jesus Christ is a god,— 
And the only God,—I swear 

I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
The earth, the sea, and the air!” 


IX 


The question of immortality is both racial 
and timeless. Christ as pictured in the New 
Testament and the immortality of sainthood 
are inseparably coupled together. We cannot 
believe in one without believing in the other. 
If Christ is central to the dateless cosmic 
processes, if the production of a divine man- 
hood is the final end toward which these 
processes have been directed, then the belief 
in immortality is rational, a necessitated belief. 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS _ 57 


Christ taught immortality. He believed in its 
reality. He lived it. He exemplified it in his 
history. The claims for immortality need not 
be argued. This is not to say that the subject 
is not fraught with mystery. But mysteries 
insoluble close around human life on every 
side. We are forced to acknowledge the 
mysteries, and yet we live. The major premise 
of Christianity, a premise that the thought of 
the ages has not been able to wear down, 
posits a heavenly immortality for at least all 
men who are spiritually united to Christ. 
Grant the premise, and the argument is 
ended. 

I have traversed somewhat the gloomy 
wastes of a negative philosophy as related to 
this great question. To a mind of Christian 
tempers, it can but be regarded as a melan- 
choly phenomenon that in this day so many 
bright intellects seem to receive no inspiration 
for life from a belief in immortality. And yet 
the thought of final extinction would seem to 
be a normal repulsion to all healthy minds. 
Professor Huxley, writing to an illustrious 
friend, as if speaking from a deep instinct in 
his own being, said: “It is a curious thing that 
I find my dislike to the thought of extinction 
increasing as I get older. It flashes across me 
at all sorts of times with a sort of horror that 


58 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


in 1900 I shall probably know no more than 
I did in 1800. I had rather be in hell.” 
“The wish that of the living whole, 
No life shall fail beyond the grave, 


Derives it not from what we have, 
The likest God within the soul? 


“My own dim life shall teach me this, 
That life shall live for evermore, 
Else earth is darkness at the core, 

And dust and ashes all that 1s.” 


There is abroad, however, a materialistic 
philosophy of doom more abhorrent than 
prison glooms. In his essay “A Free Man’s 
Worship” Bertrand Russell, a brilliant artist 
of the materialistic school, has drawn a picture 
both fateful and horrible. I know the scorn 
and belittlement in which I might be rated 
by thinkers who sympathize with Bertrand 
Russell. But still I ask, Is not Mr. Russell’s 
philosophy, as applied to the entire universe 
and to eternity, both most provincial and 
inconclusive? Granted that his logic if his 
premise were all-inclusive is not overdrawn, 
yet is he not dealing with the mere perishable 
scaffolding of the moral universe? Mr. Russell 
probably does not believe that the material 
universe is the construction of a creative God. 
ff he does not, he begs wholesale a premise 
which cannot be granted. No amount of dis- 


LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS _ 59 


cussion would ever bring him and, for illus- 
tration, Dr. L. P. Jacks together. But it 
would by no means follow that the stars in 
their courses are fighting Russell’s battles. 
If, as we have assumed, the final purpose of 
the universe is moral, then God who has been 
at such cost to prepare this temporary board- 
ing school of earth for the training of his sons, 
will, when their day of graduation comes, be 
prepared to welcome them to more spiritual 
and enduring habitations for their future 
careers. If, as Mr. Russell seems to believe, 
the physical universe is nothing more than a 
huge machine which in some unaccountable 
way has been wound up for a temporary run- 
ning, but which is now hopelessly running 
down, then his philosophy is entirely fitting to 
his premises. But it is still the privilege of 
the man of faith to believe in a God who will 
not mock in such fateful and heartless way 
the top voices, the high prophetic pledges, of 
his own universe. It is our privilege, at least, 
to believe that Mr. Russell’s philosophy is 
false, that it is founded upon a blind premise. 
It makes the universe irrational. It loses 
sight altogether of mightiest creative forces— 
the moral and the spiritual. Even, for the 
sake of illustration, if my own life-long trust 
is false, if my faith is vain, I shall in the end 


60 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


fare no worse than Mr. Russell. If, on the 
other hand, my Christian hopes are well 
based, I shall come to a godlike and imperish- 
able heritage of which his philosophy can have 
no vision. 

The setting sun of day builds its crimson 
portals on western horizons, leaving behind all 
shadows of the night, only to carry new morn- 
ings to far-hidden lands. And so, as I sit by 
the Westward Windows, I am not unmindful 
that soon I must pass the sunset gates. I 
face this certainty unafraid and in the con- 
fident faith that in a near and endless morning, 
the night forever gone, I shall see 


“ .. Those angel faces smile, 
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.” 


il 
SHAMGAR 


Tue book of Judges is a gallery of heroes 
preserved to us from a far day. Its colors, 
untouched by the fades of time, are as vivid 
as though put upon yesterday’s canvas. It 
is a creation of primitive artists who wrought 
with unrestrained imaginations, and yet true 
to the heroic fancies and wonder-loving in- 
stincts of a prescientific age. These artists 
made free use of myth and legend without 
slightest thought or fear of damage which 
might befall their structures from the edged 
tools of a later criticism. There are resistless 
fascination and charm in the morning creations 
of history. These creations are art rather 
than science. They find original expression in 
poetry which was race-inspired long before the 
exactions of logic or scientific demonstrations 
came in to vex the free imagination of prim- 
itive genius. 


I 


In the list of Israel’s early Judges appears 


the name Shamgar. This name is found 
61 


62 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


really only in a single passage, a passage 
standing at the end of a chapter, and which 
might be easily overlooked. Yet this single 
verse tells us all we know of a whole period 
of Israelitish history. It is really thus a type 
of all history. The term “history,” at best, 
is but a synonym for samples, a type of the 
fragmentary. The real, the inclusive history 
of mankind is one forever unwritten. Such 
history as we have is too often occupied with 
men and events chiefly noted as instruments 
and events destructive of the higher interests 
of mankind. Cain is known from history’s 
earliest day as the slayer of his brother. The 
record of the great captain of Israel, Joshua, 
is marked by an unbroken trail of exterminating 
warfare. The old Assyrian, Babylonian, and 
Egyptian empires built up their great power 
and prosperity by predatory ravages .and on 
the shoulders of enslaved masses. ‘The bar- 
barous and dehumanizing lessons of these 
ancient peoples were little improved upon 
in the more recent records of Greece, forever 
immortal in intellectual renown, and of Rome, 
the military and legal ruler of the world. 
Whatever of indirect benefits may have accrued 
to mankind from the wars of Cesar and 
Napoleon, they themselves were wholesale 
assassins of men and of nations. I do not 


SHAMGAR 63 


forget, of course, that history has paid its 
tributes to the conspicuous benefactors of the 
race. But if we review the Jong drama of the 
centuries, it becomes only too apparent that 
the despots and destroyers have received more 
historic attention than have the real bene- 
factors of mankind. 

We live in the age of an omniscient press, 
a press whose function it is to furnish our 
very homes day by day with the passing 
history of the world. I have too large a view 
of the tremendous educational possibilities, of 
the unmeasured influence, and of the grave 
responsibilities attending its functions to speak 
with unguarded condemnation, or in any tone 
of unjust disparagement, against the press. 
Large sections of its activity are devoted to 
highest and best ends. In its daily issues 
there are many fine instances which are clean 
and constructive in policy. But in all candor 
and justice, the query may be seriously and 
thoughtfully raised whether the news-purveying 
press is not itself most gravely responsible 
for the promotion of the very evils which it 
so diligently exploits. We are just now passing 
through an era when the quiet of community 
life is disturbed, when the moral sense of all 
well-disposed citizens is subjected to con- 
tinuous shock by the daily reports of youthful 


64 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


depravity and criminality. There is something 
sinister, deadly, frightful in the _ situation. 
And yet criminality, and of the most revolting 
order, is conspicuously exploited in the daily 
press. The efforts of detective forces to trail 
and arrest criminals are by the sleepless activ- 
ities of sensational reporters themselves antic- 
ipated and published so that the criminal 
hiding from justice is himself constantly notified 
and forewarned of efforts looking to his arrest. 
It would seem only the part of a decent inter- 
est in the common safety and welfare of the 
general community for the newspapers rigidly 
to refrain from such practical partnership in 
aid of criminals. 

But this is not the worst feature of the 
ease. Crime is not only conspicuously but 
artistically exploited in the daily press. Our 
present society seems infested with “moral 
idiots,’ with a certain dangerous contingent 
of youthful criminal life. However it comes 
about, or whatever its sourees, in the criminal 
classes there is a shocking prevalence of youth- 
ful adventurers. . Many, perhaps most, of 
these are persons of a perverted moral sense. 
Desperate exploits in crime are their ideals 
of heroism. To do a dastardly piece of ban- 
ditry, or even to commit murder, and to “get 
away with it,” is their ideal of supreme smart- 


SHAMGAR 65 


ness. As measured by any sane or enduring 
standards of morality, such persons are not 
only fools but they are a standing menace 
against the common safety. But there is 
nothing which so much feeds and encourages 
their false and criminal vanity as to see their 
deeds widely exploited in the daily press. 
They lurk around the hiding places of their 
criminality vaunting themselves that they are 
members of a modern knighthood of chivalry. 
In deference to the best moral traditions of 
society, if on no other grounds, the newspaper 
press ought to be a minister of most unequiv- 
ocal and stern condemnation against crime 
anywhere and by whomsoever committed. 
The common plea that it is the function of 
the press to furnish the news of whatever 
character on the ground that the people clamor 
for it all, is a plea morally vicious. The 
press that proceeds practically on this premise 
is a press that is creative of and morally 
pandering to a depraved taste among men. 
If the yielding to this standard and policy is 
a matter of money-making, then this is simply 
an announcement that one of the very most 
potent agencies in civilization for the intel- 
lectual and moral education of society, for the 
lifting of right standards of character, is 
itself under a mercenary mortgage to Mam- 


66 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


mon. There is a wide, I am sure a growing 
but unorganized, discontent among right- 
minded people with many newspapers in 
relation to their methods in crime publicity. 
There are multitudes of readers who subscribe 
to the daily press who are compelled to do 
so for the obtaining of world news, market 
reports, and for other intimate interests, infor- 
mation of which is not easily accessible to 
them from other sources, who nevertheless 
habitually experience a sense of palled weari- 
ness and disgust with the slush that daily 
comes into their homes and offices. 

Such people make up the finest constituencies 
among newspaper readers. The truth is that 
while domestic slanders, divorces, occasional 
downfalls of men who have borne reputations 
for excellent character, and all sorts of sordid 
crime are conspicuously exploited in the news 
columns, the great steady ongoing society is 
made up of good men and women, of loyal 
homes, where children are trained in good 
ideals—homes whose life is the abiding pledge 
of social and moral rectitude, the up-staying 
support of the social and moral civilization 
itself. But the life of all this latter kind moves 
on in such normal health, with such harmony 
and quietude, with such integrity of moral 
habit, as to awaken for itself no sensational 


SHAMGAR 67 


or morbid interest. It would certainly seem 
that some measure of respectful consideration 
is due to this constituency. In the meantime 
large sections of the daily press are conspicu- 
ously exploiting the abnormal life of society 
with little or no apparent emphasis upon the 
life of that far larger community which is 
giving moral health and security to the world. 

Recorded history, in the very nature of the 
case, can take only exceptional note of the 
individual. The masses of mankind from the 
beginning until now have, generation by gen- 
eration, gone down behind the horizons and 
to forgetfulness just as certainly as though 
they were only so many pebbles cast into 
midocean. History perpetuates itself in pa- 
thetic disregard of human ambitions. Many 
have their little day of display upon the stage, 
their dreams of achievement, only after a 
little to disappear and to be forgotten. Even 
the inscriptions on our tombstones are soon 
so illegible as to lose all significance for pos- 
terity. There is melancholy truthfulness in 
the fancy of the old art custodian who while 
guarding his pictures had seen generations 
pass until he came to feel that pictures were 
the reality, while men were but shadows. 

But here, in this far away day, we still read 
the name—Shamgar. All the people of his 


68 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


period lie forgotten, unepitaphed, unknown, 
under the dust and unawaking sleep of the 
ages. 

The critics do not know quite what to do 
with Shamgar. His accredited deed taxes their 
credence. Some of them think he was an alien 
in Israel. They are not certain whether he 
fought the Philistines or the Ishmaelites. 
Fortunately, for our present purposes, we are 
at liberty to part company with the critics. 
Whether Shamgar was a real or legendary 
character, the lessons of the record are time- 
less, and such as to apply to human life in 
every age. 

II 

Shamgar appears as the type of a humble 
life which rises to great achievement. He was 
not primarily a warrior. He does not appear 
really to have been a public character. He 
was a farmer. He first appears to us as plow- 
ing in the field with oxen. The life-giving 
earth fed his strength, the native oxygen 
vitalized his blood. The day and night heav- 
ens, daylight and starlight, forest, lake, and 
landscape, bird-song and flowers—all nature 
with its constant play and complexity of life 
was his training school. The farmer lives 
near to nature’s heart. He has always been 
a prolific source of society’s most creative and 


SHAMGAR 69 


fruitful life. His sons have been builders of 
cities, the founders and directors of great 
enterprises, leaders in the learned professions, 
foremost pioneers in scientific discovery. These 
men often carry in themselves unsuspected 
resources which are summoned into requisition 
only by emergencies. This was true of 
Shamgar. A critical and perilous public emer- 
gency arose, and with it there came a call 
for prompt and heroic action on the part of 
Shamgar. He proved himself athletic, brave, 
and resourceful. Like another Cincinnatus, a 
Roman, also a farmer, Shamgar went forth 
from the fields to fight and to win the battles 
of his tribe. He proved himself equal to the 
crisis of the hour, and his name is enrolled 
among the liberators of mankind. 

A most inspiring lesson of history is seen 
in its countless list of men who have risen 
from humble sources to creative and con- 
spicuous leadership in all the walks of human 
progress. In the human family genius is 
monopolized by no levels of caste or of special 
privilege. Like Melchizedek, it has no family 
pedigree—it being frequently without known 
father or mother. Robert Burns was a poetic 
genius of the first rank, yet he sprang from an 
obscure and unpedigreed stock. The Creator, 
who hides a wealth of gold and precious jewels 


70 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


in the depths of earth and sea, has also invested 
largely the finer potentialities of genius and 
of service with the lowly and unpedigreed of 
mankind. 

Abraham, of whose antecedents we know 
next to nothing, was practically exiled from 
his native land and guided into what was to 
him a distant and unknown country, that 
there he might become the founder of a new 
dynasty of faith in the earth. His name, 
after the lapse of forty centuries, is a world 
household word. He is known in history as 
the “Friend of God,’ the “Father of the 
Faithful.” The sublimest heroisms and the 
noblest martyrs of truth in all subsequent 
generations would seem to have sprung from 
the intellectual and moral lineage of which 
he was the founder. 

Martin Luther was the son of a coal miner. 
But he was born with a spark of unquench- 
able greatness in his soul. Through condi- 
tions of forbiding poverty he worked his way 
through the university, and early made himself 
a leader in German scholarship. By dint 
of long-continued and most diligent study of 
the Scriptures, and through painful travail of 
soul, he finally emancipated himself in both 
thought and conscience from the construc- 
tions and tyranny of the traditional faith in 


SHAMGAR 71 


which he was born. In his new-found freedom 
he stepped forth from his cloistered life like 
one heaven-ordained for the inauguration of 
a new age. Like a very Jove he hurled the 
lightnings of truth against the hoary errors 
of Roman tradition and despotism, shattering 
them beyond the possibilities of reinstatement 
in intelligent thought. He opened a new era 
of intellectual and moral freedom for man- 
kind. It is impossible to overstate the mag- 
nitude and significance of his mission. He 
changed the intellectual and moral currents of 
history. 

John Wesley was the son of a godly but 
quaint old English rector. Epworth Parish, 
his birthplace, was one of the most forbidding 
and least remunerative in the Church of 
England. It “had but recently been redeemed 
from the fens, and at its borders, near the 
sluggish streams, was still little better than a 
swamp, sodden and malarious.” Its inhab- 
itants generally were of a low order both in 
intelligence and morals, predominantly vulgar 
and irreligious. They harassed the godly 
rector in ways that were brutal, burning his 
crops, hocking his cattle, and finally burning 
down his rectory. But in that same parish, 
in a heroic service of thirty-eight continuous 
years, he lived down prejudices and hatreds, 


72 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


and largely won the confidence and respect 
of the community. But, with a large family, 
this long life in the Epworth rectory was a 
continuous struggle with poverty. 

It was in such an environment that John 
Wesley was born. He has now been dead a 
century and a quarter of years. But he has 
a secure historic place as the founder of a 
spiritual empire, including actual communicants 
and an affiliated following, of not less than 
forty million souls—an empire which in present 
growth, in material endowments, and in ex- 
pansive plans for world-conquest, was never 
so vigorous, never so prophetic as now. 

The ages testify to the power of genius to 
rise superior to the handicaps of humble birth 
and of poverty. The demonstrations of this 
truth are nowhere more pronounced than in 
the fields of literature. The discouragements 
of the literary life have often been emphasized 
by successful authors themselves. Southey, 
writing to a candidate for the profession, said: 
“Woe be to the youthful poet who sets out 
upon his pilgrimage to the temple of fame 
with nothing but hope for his viaticum! There 
is the Slough of Despond, and the Hill of 
Difficulty, and the Valley of the Shadow of 
Death upon the way.” Coleridge advised 
young writers thus: “Never pursue literature 


SHAMGAR 73 


as a trade.” Washington Irving, early one of 
the most successful of American authors, 
dwelling upon “the seductive but treacherous 
paths of literature,” adds: “There is no life 
more precarious in its profits and more falla- 
cious in its enjoyments than that of an author.” 

“Paradise Lost’’ holds a secure place as the 
foremost epic in English letters. To its pro- 
duction Milton gave many years of incessant 
reflection and toil. Into it he poured un- 
stintedly the wealth of his prodigious learning. 
He, at its inception, aimed to produce no 
ordinary work. It was to be in his own thought 
an “adventurous song, that with no middle 
flight intends to soar above the AZonian Mount, 
while it pursues things unattempted yet in 
prose or rime.” In aid for this work he 
invoked the Spirit of all inspiration thus: 
“What in me is dark illumine, what is low 
raise and support; that to the height of this 
great argument, I may assert eternal Prov- 
idence and justify the ways of God to man.” 
When the genius of this finished work first 
burst forth, it was hailed, in comparison with 
all other works, “as an eagle’ whose “cloud- 
less thunder’ had “bolted on” the world. 

This immortal epic was sold to the printer, 
Simmons, for five pounds down involving 
all copyrights and royalties forever, when an 


3 


74 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


edition of thirteen hundred copies had been 
sold; and with the further promise of two 
more five pounds each when two more like 
editions had been marketed. 

Dante, “the greatest genius between the 
Augustan and Elizabethan ages,” wrote his 
timeless epics while in banishment and in want. 
Shakespeare began life as a wool-carder. Sam- 
uel Johnson, in early life, was in such penury 
that a “garret was a luxury to him.” Oliver 
Goldsmith was both poor and improvident. 
He said to a friend: “Oh, gods! gods! here in 
a garret, writing for bread, and expecting to 
be dunned for a milk-score!’ Erasmus, the 
foremost classical scholar of the sixteenth 
century, as a youth was poor and ragged, but 
he had an insuppressible taste for learning. 
He said, “As soon as I get any money I will 
buy first Greek books, and then clothes.” 
Schiller was a poor boy, often in distress, 
wanting both friends and bread; but he reso- 
lutely followed the gleam of his genius, and 
ranks forever with the immortals. Defoe, 
author of Robinson Crusoe, said of himself: 
“T have been fed more by miracles than Elijah 
when the ravens were his purveyors. ...I have 
seen the rough side of the world as well as 
the smooth, and have in less than half a year 
tasted the difference between the closet of a 


SHAMGAR 15 


king and the dungeon of Newgate.” Fielding 
was poor and financially reckless, yet enor- 
mously diligent. He tells us that he wrote 
“Tom Jones with an ache and a pain to every 
sentence.” 

Genius has often lighted the cells of dun-: 
geons. Saint Paul wrote some of his most 
heartening epistles, and John Bunyan his 
immortal Pilgrum, within prison walls. 
Madame Guyon sang her sweetest songs while 
a prisoner in the Bastile. The fires of genius 
which God has kindled in elect souls can 
neither be extinguished by adversity nor 
quenched in the prisons of injustice. Vulgar 
power may physically imprison genius but 
cannot quench its lights. The Prince of Verona 
decided the exile of Dante. He one day asked 
Dante to account for the fact that in the 
household of princes the court-fool was in 
greater favor than the philosopher. Dante’s 
bold, but rash reply was: “Similarity of mind 
is all over the world the source of friendship.” 
The “‘Prince of Verona” can hardly be dragged 
from historic oblivion. The name of Dante, 
both intellectually and morally, shines a star 
of the first magnitude in the galaxies of genius. 


Til 
1. Shamgar stands for the-high values of 


76 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


a courageous and consecrated individuality. 
As by a blast of thunder he, quietly pursuing 
his plow, was suddenly awakened to a sense 
of impending peril. A powerful and relentless 
foe was at his very gates. Immediate action 
of some kind must be taken. A self-calculating 
prudence might have prompted instant flight. 
Many would have taken this course. But 
Shamgar was a patriot. He thought of his 
tribal province, of its homes, of its liberties. 
To resist the enemy was indeed a desperate 
resolve. It might—it probably would—mean 
death to him. But the foe unresisted meant 
ruthless demolition of his province, cruel 
enslavement for its people, nameless desecra- 
tion of its domestic altars. Shamgar was of 
that heroic mold to whom death in defeat 
would be far preferable to life in slavery. 
He promptly rallied his fellow yeomen, and, 
for liberty or death, faced the enemy. Daunt- 
less courage as against obstacles most appalling 
has been the decisive temper of the most 
brilliant achievers. 

Missionary Ridge was fortressed with bat- 
teries and bristled with bayonets. At the 
battle of Chattanooga it was not even in 
General Grant’s purpose to attack these heights. 
But the impetuous advance of Sheridan’s 
division would brook no delay. Without 


SHAMGAR 77 


orders, and facing destructive shot and shell, 
this army climbed the dizzy slopes, hurled 
itself against the foe, and soon the flag of the 
Union floated from the crests of Missionary 
Ridge. 

It is not on militant battlefields, nor still 
on mountain heights, that the real heroism 
of the race is mostly displayed. Moral hero- 
ism is a chief characteristic of human life on 
all dutiful planes of conduct, and in every 
generation. The volume of moral heroism on 
the common planes of human conduct is the 
great unwritten volume of the world. 

2. Shamgar’s campaign was characterized 
by instant promptness of action. This was 
not the least secret of his success. His enemies 
assumed that they were stealing a silent and 
undiscovered march upon the land, and they 
expected an easy conquest. He took the 
aggressive, surprised his enemies, wrought a 
panic in their camp, and scattered them as a 
wolf might a flock of sheep. 

Napoleon said: “At Arcola I won the battle 
with twenty-five horsemen. I seized a moment 
of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and 
gained the day with this handful. Two armies 
are two bodies which meet and endeavor to 
frighten each other: a moment of panic occurs, 
and that moment must be turned to advan- 


78 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


tage.” Again, he declared: “Every moment 
lost gives an opportunity for misfortune: I 
beat the Austrians because they never knew 
the value of time; while they dawdled I over- 
threw them.” 

8. Shamgar’s achievement illustrates the 
value of making the most of one’s individu- 
ality. At first thought it might be reasoned 
that a West Point training would have been 
of special value to him. For modern warfare 
this inference would, on general principles, be 
correct. But the methods and weapons of 
modern warfare were, of course, utterly un- 
known to Shamgar and to his age. The 
weapons of the foe which he was to meet 
were of primitive and rude type. In any 
event, no technical training can ever be made 
to counterbalance native bravery and inventive 
resourcefulness. Shamgar had both. He sim- 
ply used what he had in hand, the implement 
with which he had a trained familiarity. The 
ox-goad consisted of a long spearlike handle 
with a steel point at one end for prodding the 
oxen, and at the other end a shovel-blade for 
cleaving the soil from his plowshare. This 
would seem the simplest kind of armor, really 
an absurd outfit for aggressive conflict with a 
determined foe. But behind that simple 
weapon there was an arm of brawn, a heart 


SHAMGAR 79 


of flame, and a determination undaunted by 
mortal fear. A spirit thus equipped is a 
miracle-worker. 

There is some trait of power, some strategy 
of success in every man, which does not belong 
to his neighbor. Emerson has said: “Insist 
on yourself: never imitate. Your own gift 
you can present every moment with the 
cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; 
but of the adopted talent of another you have 
only an extemporaneous half possession. That 
which each man can do best, none but his 
Maker can teach him.” And again: “A man 
should learn to detect and watch that gleam 
of light which flashes across his mind from 
within, more than the luster of the firmament 
of bards and sages.” 

God often signalizes sublimest missions by 
magnifying the humblest instruments. ‘““What 
is that in thine hand?” It was but a plain 
old staff that Moses had long carried as a 
sheep-herder in the plains. But the simplest 
thing in one’s hand when coupled with a 
great commission from God may be made to 
symbolize the presence of a miracle-working 
power. 

When the bullying giant paraded himself 
daily before the camp of Israel, roaring his © 
terrible defiance, Saul had not one soldier 


80 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


ready to meet the challenge to personal com- 
bat. David, the shepherd lad, a fair-haired 
boy, had come to the camp to bring food for 
his older brothers. It was this lad who stood 
ready to meet the Philistine’s challenge. He 
was not a soldier. He had never trained in 
military armor. He could not use the armor 
of the king. He must fight, if at all, by his 
own methods. Back in the shepherd’s fields 
with long practice he became expert in the 
use of the simple sling and stone. This 
weapon he could use like a wizard. The 
giant greeted him with disdain, and _ threat- 
ened to cast his body to the vultures. But 
David having picked a pebble from the dry 
brook-bed buried that pebble in the giant’s 
brain, and the braggart bit the dust. The 
only use that David had for a sword was to 
take Goliath’s own sword for the cutting off 
of dead Goliath’s head. 

In the very nature of things the real genius 
must be exceptional. Not every man can 
originate the unusual and brilliant move. It 
would seem desirable, for instance, that cul- 
ture should be universal. This may come at 
some time in the long evolution of the race. 
But, even so, the great majorities would do 
their work in quiet and inconspicuous form. 
The world’s work would be vastly better done 


SHAMGAR 81 


than it is now done. Culture, even then, 
would bring its own rewards in the common 
exaltation of intelligence and character. But 
whatever the general intelligence, the big bulk 
of the world’s work will always be wrought 
on the plains, not on the summits. However 
exceptional and enviable the gifts of genius, 
the secret of true character will be an unwaver- 
ing fidelity to duty in one’s own sphere, how- 
ever humble that may be. 

The military cadet might covet for himself 
the genius of a Napoleon. But in all the 
centuries the Napoleons have been confined to 
a group of less than a dozen. The sculptor 
and painter might each aspire to become the 
greatest in his art. But a Phidias and a 
Raphael are the overtopping products of whole 
civilizations. The singer might dream of com- 
posing a song-ritual which might remain an 
enduring charm through the ages. But Israel 
produced only one preeminent psalm-singer, 
and Methodism with all its hosts has given 
birth to but one Charles Wesley. The preacher 
might covet for himself the fame of an Edwards, 
a Summerfield, or a Beecher. But such men 
are produced not more than one in a century. 

God’s approvals rest not distinctively with 
geniuses nor with the mighty, but always with 
inner motives of action whether among earth’s 


82 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


great or lowly. Above all the wealth of the 
ages Christ has distinguished forever the poor 
widow who cast all her living into the treasury. 
Among the wide varieties of individuality 
there are some eccentric qualities. But in 
God’s world workshop there is place for every 
kind of workman. Ehud was a left-handed 
Benjamite, but he delivered Israel. 

A standing marvel of nature is in God’s 
infinite varieties. The botanist finds no two 
leaves of the forest exactly alike. Canary 
birds seem much the same. But closely exam- 
ine .a thousand of them, and each, as distin- 
guished from all others, will show a special 
quality of song, of disposition, and appearance. 
As among the myriads of human beings there 
are no two faces precisely alike, so there are 
no duplicate gifts in individuality. And this 
points to one of the gravest facts in all human 
life. The ideal world, foretold by prophets 
and poets, will never come till all men loyally 
do their work. Individuality means that each 
has a place to fill which no other mortal can 
occupy. If I fail to fill my place, however 
humble in itself, there will remain at least 
one corner in the garden uncultivated, one 
opportunity forever lost. The perfect struc- 
ture of civilization and of God’s kingdom in 
the earth awaits the touch somewhere of every 


SHAMGAR 83 


workman’s hand. No man has a right to 
despise his gift. It is a false standard and a 
degenerative impulse which decides any man 
to do less than his duty. A tragic pathos in 
the parable of the talents is that the man 
who received but the one talent went and 
buried it in the field. No prophet can fore- 
cast the possible fruitage of any single gift 
conscientiously used. It is an easy and com- 
mon temptation to judge of life’s values by 
what are thought great and not small achieve- 
ments. Christ reverses this method. When 
he would picture a man’s fitness for large 
trusts, he says, “He that is faithful in little 
is faithful also in that which is much.” No 
man can be trusted in large things who is 
faithless in small things. God’s order for 
promoting men is based on their fidelity and 
efficiency in the lesser places. Said Charles 
Wesley, “Brother John, if the Lord would 
give me wings, I’d fly.” Said John, “Brother 
Charles, if the Lord should tell me to fly, 
I’d fly, and leave him to find the wings.” 
John was right. Be faithful where you are. 
Do well your present work. Leave the rest 
with God. 
IV 

A final lesson: The man of courageous and 

consecrated individuality is likely to succeed. 


84 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


Shamgar delivered Israel. The race is not 
always to the swift, nor the battle to the 
strong. In days of the Civil War the Con- 
federate ram Albemarle, moored in the Roanoke 
River, was a perpetual terror to the armored 
fleets of Admiral Porter in the sounds of 
North Carolina. With her low decks and 
sloping walls of steel, this ram would steal 
from her moorings and drive the fleet as a 
wolf a flock of sheep. The heaviest missiles 
glanced from her sides without effect. How 
to deal with this monster was a baffling ques- 
tion. It was then that William B. Cushing, 
a young lieutenant, blonde as a girl, volun- 
teered to undertake the destruction of this 
ram. His plan was simple. He would con- 
struct a small launch on the fore of which he 
would project a boom itself headed with a 
highly charged torpedo, which at the critical 
instant he could discharge against its objective. 
It seemed to staid naval officers a desperate, if 
nota crazy, undertaking. But he was promised, 
if successful, promotion in rank and a liberal 
financial award. His plan was to steal up 
the river at night, and from the shore opposite 
from the ram’s moorings to drive straight 
across and, running his boom under the ram’s 
water-line, to explode his torpedo under her 
bottom. Just before reaching the ram he was 


SHAMGAR 85 


discovered, and a battery-fire disabled his 
launch. Bidding his men save themselves as 
best they might, taking advantage of his 
momentum he exploded his torpedo, and the 
ram was sunk, he himself swimming diag- 
onally across the river, where he lay hid for 
all the next day in the tall growths on 
the bank. The next night, with but a piece 
of board in his hand, in a little log dugout 
he paddled himself down the river to 
the Sound, where he was rescued, and car- 
ried to the fleet amid the thunders of a great 
cheer. 

Cushing was face to face with a tremendous 
and baffling emergency. His success seemed 
little less than miraculous. It was a brilliant 
achievement in human daring. It is due, 
however, to emphasize that the real heroisms 
of life are seldom played on the spectacular 
stage. Duty on any plane of activity is an 
arena for the truest heroism. Good mothers 
especially are the saviours of society. These, 
far more than the “Great captains with their 
guns and drums” are makers of the true 
civilization. 

Motherhood is the divinest function of the 
human world. Its sphere often seems humble 
and obscure, its tasks ordinary, its mission 
hidden from the sources of fame. But in 


86 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


God’s moral world no duty is small, no task 
insignificant. 


“The humblest deed if duly wrought 
In unison with God’s great thought,” 


may be both magnified and glorified in a rich 
yield of immortal values. 

Susanna Wesley, queenly in both her intel- 
ligence and refinements, a woman who could 
have graced a throne, would seem to have 
merited a better station than as a humble 
rector’s wife in a poor, rude, and out-of-the 
way English country parish. It ought not to 
seem in itself exceptional, nor other than the 
normal thing, that she found time to give 
specific religious Instruction to each of her 
numerous children. She would take a half- 
hour one evening in each week to give little 
“Jackie” special religious teaching and a 
mother’s prayer. She did the same thing for 
little “Charlie.” This does not seem so great 
a thing, nor so wonderful, for a mother to 
have done. But who shall undertake to 
measure the possible moral outcome of this 
mother-work? This humble rector’s wife, in a 
hidden corner of the world, was, at their 
most susceptible and receptive periods, the 
chief trainer of what were to become the fore- 
most evangelist and ecclesiastical statesman 


SHAMGAR 87 


and the greatest psalmist of the Protestant 
ages—John and Charles Wesley. 

This seems eternally true, whatever its 
plane of action, that a dutiful life is a morally 
creative life. Matthew Arnold never wrote a 
nobler or a truer sentiment than when, fifteen 
years after his father’s death, he dedicated 
“Rugby Hall’ as a eulogy to the moral great- 
ness and abiding influence of Thomas Arnold. 


Tit 
WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 


In nature the nonintelligent factors, as unre- 
lated to instinct or intellect, are mostly in 
charge of gravitation. The rock, loosed by 
rain and frost from its perch on the crag, 
ean only fall to lower levels. Gravitation 
carries the waters of the river ever downward, 
and along courses of least resistance. The 
river does not move in straight lines. It never 
ascends the mountains. Its pathway is always 
on the downgrades. All vital forces seem to 
assert a kind of defiance against gravitation. 
The Giant Sequoias of California, springing 
originally from a tiny seed, have pushed their 
growths skyward until their topmost branches 
salute the sun. Their vitality challenges the 
ravages of both storm and decay. They live 
on through the centuries, asserting themselves 
as the most ancient monarchs of the vegetable 
creation. The eagle rears its young on the 
topmost crags and sports its wing on the 
skirts of upper tempests. 

When we come to study man, we are face 


to face with a new classification in the world 
88 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 89 


of organic life. His possibilities range over 
widely contrasted destinies. Physically, he 
may become an athletic paragon or a weakling; 
intellectually, a constructive genius or an 
ignoramus; morally, he may become godlike 
or devilish. He is a moral personality, rational, 
self-conscious, self-directive, the responsible 
maker of his own character and final place 
in a moral universe. He stands now between 
two infinities—eternal life or its eternal loss. 
If he wins the one, he must walk an ever- 
ascending, and often difficult, pathway. He 
must deny degenerate ease, injurious appetite, 
self-indulgence, low ambition. The prizes set 
before him are no less than imperishable 
character and a moral kingdom. He must 
conquer all forces, surmount all obstacles that 
dispute his progress toward these prizes. 

While all such study must of necessity be 
fragmentary, it is the purpose of this paper 
to take some survey of conditions through 
which man must school himself for his high- 
est achievements and destiny. 


I 
Temptation, evil in itself, if resisted, over- 
come, may be made to minister to athletic 
character. The human breast is the world’s 
most crucial battlefield. The individual con- 


90 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


sciousness is the arena of conflict for the most 
antipodal forces. It is never a neutral ground. 
The strategy of evil may assume most allur- 
ing guise. It may say of forbidden fruit: 
“Eat of it, it will make you wise as the gods.” 
But death lurks at the core. The moral realm 
alone is the one in which are sheltered life’s 
supreme values. This realm is held only at 
the price of supreme loyalties; it admits. of 
no compromises. It is assaulted on every side 
by evil forces: perverted appetites, the false 
lures of unethical ambitions, the lust of con- 
scienceless power, the tyranny of corrupting 
fashions, plausible appeals for the lowering of 
standards and the bribing of conscience— 
these all, and all their kin, are in constant 
conspiracy against the moral fortresses of the 
soul. An inclusive epitome of the quality and 
subtilties of evil temptations is set forth in 
the life of the superlative Teacher. At a time 
when in the solitudes there were dawning upon 
his consciousness the immense magnitude and 
solemnities of his mission, when there was 
tiding in upon him a sense of his own tran- 
scendent power over nature, when his physical 
forces were on the borders of exhaustion and 
he was therefore most susceptible to the 
approaches of the tempter—at such a time 
he was approached by the most plausible 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 91 


temptations that could be framed by the arch- 
genius of evil. 

Physically famished, it was suggested that he 
satisfy his hunger by turning the stones into 
bread. The suggestion was plausible to the 
very point of legitimacy. But, No. He was 
in the world to do God’s will, to be himself 
subject to nature’s laws, to share the human 
lot, to prove himself in conduct a faultless 
example for mankind. He could not capitalize 
his divine power for selfish ends. 

He was facing the most prodigious task of 
history. It would seem all-important that he 
take the promptest measures to draw to him- 
self the popular attention, to excite the gen- 
eral wonder, to win to himself the widest fol- 
lowing of the people. Why not make some 
magical display of his power? The appeal to 
human credulity is always a central tempta- 
tion to the seeker for popular power. It is 
always the method of the impostor. But 
again, No. Christ’s mission was moral, as 
wide in its diameters as God’s purposes, as 
enduring in meaning and results as destiny. 
It was a mission so divinely ideal as absolutely 
to admit of no cheapening alloy. It was but 
a momentary suggestion. Christ instantly 
discerned the very core of its quality and 
spurned it from his thought. 


92 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


Christ was here to establish a world-kingdom. 
A world-kingdom! The very dream of world- 
dominion has haunted the breasts of the most 
imperial geniuses. This prize has seemed the 
most covetable to be set before human am- 
bition. And its appeal was pressed upon the 
thought of Christ. His final purpose was 
spiritual. But would not some kind of tem- 
poral sovereignty of the world be an advan- 
tageous foundation on which to build the 
final spiritual empire? To deal righteously 
with this temptation required the clearest 
moral discernment, the most heroic loyalty to 
duty. It only required a single bending of 
the knee to the devil, a single gesture of wor- 
ship, and the kingdoms of the world were his! 
It is but the price which has been paid by 
many seekers of world-power. But still, No. 
This price accepted would have meant the 
utter perversion and defeat of Christ’s supreme 
mission for mankind. He flung it from his 
presence with the force of a thunderbolt. The 
tempter was vanquished. 

Christ was physically spent; but he was 
Moral Victor for all the human ages, and in 
his extremity God’s angels came and minis- 
tered unto him. And this is an enduring type 
of the moral life for all men. The magnitude 
of Christ’s moral conflict no other man will 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE — 93 


ever be called upon fully to encounter. But 
it perpetually symbolizes the kind of tempta- 
tions common to human life, furnishes the 
motives for overcoming evil, and pictures the 
joys and strength of victory for the over- 
comers. Evil temptations overcome beget 
divine strength of soul, the intellectual and 
moral ascents give an ever-widening vision, 
high attainments give introduction to life’s 
loftiest fellowships, supreme and abiding joys 
come in ever-increasing measure to those whose 
feet loyally pursue the sacrificial pathways of 
love, of duty, and of righteousness. God has 
so constituted the moral universe about us 
that it always ministers adequate help to the 
morally loyal. But God’s ministering angels 
serve banquets only to moral victors. 


II 

Poverty, in itself, is not promotive of success. 
That poverty which means undernourishment 
of the body, ill heated and ill ventilated 
abodes, squalid environments, submerged and 
hopeless community life—all this is little less 
than fatal exclusion from life’s best. The 
measure of such poverty in the human world 
is appalling. Great Britain, a ruler of the 
world and queen of the seas, stands in the 
front rank of civilization. It is a land of 


94 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


historic universities, fruitful producer of great 
literatures, arts, and sciences. In her world- 
famed necropolis are the monumental me- 
morials of many of the world’s most illus- 
trious names. London, the financial capital of 
commerce, is the most historic, well-nigh the 
most populous, of all modern cities. 

It, however, both excites our wonder and 
chills our admiration to reflect that in 1913, 
the year preceding the World War, nearly 
thirty per cent of the inhabitants of London 
were living on a plane of under-physical 
nourishment and in squalid conditions gen- 
erally. And what was true of London was 
approximately true of other British cities. 
While exact information concerning present 
conditions is not available, it is morally certain 
that the postwar situation is much worse than 
that reported in 1913. It adds to the gloom 
of the picture to reflect that the victims of 
the situation are largely little children, and 
children of older age who ought to be in the 
schools. In the textile industries fifty-six per 
cent of those employed are under fifteen years 
of age, while all under twenty years amount 
to nearly ninety per cent of the whole. This 
situation places little less than a fatal embargo 
upon life. To beget children under such con- 
ditions is to introduce them to a world of 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE = 95 


drab skies, a world destitute of floral bloom 
and of bird-song, a world estranged from the 
inspirations of literature and art, to doom 
them to exclusion from the ennobling ideals 
and companionships of the world’s best life. 
Such an inheritance is in itself a dark and 
withering blight upon what otherwise might 
develop into finest realizations of character. 
It is impossible to estimate to what measure 
such conditions are the fruitful parents of 
crime. They rob childhood of the discipline 
and development of the schools. Their insuf- 
ficient wage brings physical inanition to the 
homes of multitudes of workers. They make 
purely physical needs the most insistent and 
clamorous voices of life. These conditions are 
at once the cause and the victim of a dark- 
ened moral vision, of woeful ignorance, of a 
loafing vagrancy, and of desperate criminality. 

To thoughtfully face the effect of such 
poverty upon the larger civilizat on is nothing 
less than alarming. The conditions are a 
menace to democracy. Massed poverty and 
massed ignorance are closely allied. In our 
own America we have a vast contingent of 
life on low levels of intelligence, and yet a 
contingent endowed with the sufirages of 
citizenship. This mass dwells perpetually on 
the borders of physical want. It suffers from 


96 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


perennial discontents. It has little rationa, 
apprehension of nature’s inexorable laws oj, 
supply and demand. It has a sort of massed 
belief that the politicians can direct the admin- 
istration of these laws. These masses gamble 
on the chances that any change of adminis- 
tration may result to their material advantage. 
And so, in whole armies, they are the easy 
victims of the political pretender. Communism, 
socialism, rule by the proletariat—these are 
but synonyms of fads, the slogans, througk © 


which intriguing politica! leaders build up their 


followings, always from base appeals, some- 


times dangerous, from the ranks of undis- 


cerning ignorance. 
The conditions and problems of destitute 


poverty cannot be lightly ignored. They lie ~ 
like dynamite under the very structures of , 


civilization. They insuppressibly urge the im- 
perative need of wide and upward revision: 


7 


in the world of social and industrial life. 7 


Wa 


have tarried longer than I could wish were ~ 
needful in the cellar dwelling places of extreme ~ 


poverty. But I am _ profoundly impressed 
that the attention of privileged men anc 
women in society cannot be too often or toc 
urgently summoned to thoughtful and sym- 
pathetic consideration to the crying needs of 
this underlife. The darkest facts must be. 


> hae 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 97 


looked frankly in the face and duly measured 
before bright and saving lights can be thrown 
upon these desperate situations. 

There is a far other and larger world that 
is often mislabeled as a “world of poverty.” 
In the unalterable nature of things, most of 
the world’s inhabitants must toil for a liveli- 
hood. Only the relative few can be classed 
as rich in material goods. These are often 
the objects of envy, but, as measured on the 
plane of real life and of highest values, this 
envy is seen as generally misplaced. While 
material wealth would seem to furnish a 
vantage ground for intellectual and material 
success, the historic fact is that the sons of 
the poor rise to fame in greater relative num- 
bers than do the sons of the rich. Given 
energy, vision, and ambition, no material 
hindrances can keep down the aspiring soul. 
Such souls cut their pathways past all obsta- 
cles, up all difficult grades, until finally they 
win the heights. Atsop, Terence, and Epic- 
tetus, all of classic fame, were in early life 
slaves. D’Alembert, author, and academician, 
was picked up an illegitimate foundling on 
the streets of Paris. As soon as he was able 
to reflect on his true situation, he said: “I 
have no name, but with God’s help I will 
make a name.” Columbus was a weaver’s 


98 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


son, and in his youth was a cabin boy in a 
Genoese coasting vessel. Cervantes, as a 
common foot soldier in the army of Castile 
was captured by an Algerian corsair, and car- 
ried into a pitiable slavery. He became the 
immortal author of Don Quixote. Keats, whose 
poetry is like a bird-song in English literature, 
was born in a stable. Oliver Cromwell, ‘in 
some respects the greatest of English rulers, 
was the son of a malt-brewer. Lord Clyde, 
who crushed the Sepoy rebellion, in turn a 
peer of England, was the son of a carpenter. 
His life motto, always carried with him, was: 
“By means of patience, common sense, and 
time, impossibilities become possible.” John 
Bunyan, whose Pilgrim’s Progress has been 
translated into the chief languages of the 
world, and which itself was composed in a 
jail, was a tinker. William Carey, who trans- 
lated the Bible for three hundred millions of 
the people of India, was a cobbler. Cardinal 
Woolsey, prime minister under Henry VIII, 
was the son of a butcher. Cicero, when asked 
for his lineage, replied: “I commence an 
ancestry.”’ Kepler, supreme among the world’s 
astronomers, “the great legislator of the heav- 
ens,” was the son of a poor innkeeper. 
Napoleon, when a poor student, was quar- 
tered in the home of a barber., ‘His room was 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE = 99 


well-nigh bare of furniture, containing the 
humblest couch, a rude chair, and a plain 
pine table. The barber’s wife frequently 
invited him to share in little social events 
by which she sought to relieve the monotony 
of her boarders’ lives. These invitations he 
always declined. He was solely intent upon 
the pursuit of his studies. Years after, when 
leading an army to one of his greatest vic- 
tories, passing through the barber’s village, 
he made a call upon his old boarding mistress. 
She said, “You were the lad who refused all 
my parties, and never made yourself sociable 
with your fellow boarders.” 

*“Ah,”’ said he, “Madame, if I had done in 
those days as you would have wished, I would 
not now be leading a great army to a great 
battlefield.” 

When this same Napoleon started upon his 
Italian campaign he was but twenty-six years 
of age. Taunted upon his youth, his reply 
was, “I will be old or dead in a year.” In 
less than a year this youthful commander had 
led his army over the Alps, had laid Italy at 
his feet, and had transferred three hundred 
masterpieces of Italian art to the galleries of 
Paris, and was marching his triumphant army 
toward the gates of Vienna. 

Abraham Lincoln historically holds a secure 


100 LIFE’*S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


place among the greatest of immortals. He 
was born in a floorless cabin in Kentucky; 
at twelve years of age he was a motherless 
and barefoot boy among the wilds of Indiana; 
later he was the steerer of a flatboat on the 
Mississippi and a rail-splitter in Illinois. He 
never went to college, but he studied his 
Bible, Shakespeare, and his lawbooks at night 
after days of toil in the light of a pine-knot fire. 

This kind of illustration might be indef- 
initely multiplied. It would almost appear 
that the soil of poverty has been the most 
fruitful producer of genius. But genius is an 
indomitable toiler. It reaches its coronation 
only by strenuous ascent over difficult path- 
ways. Beethoven, “the great magician of 
harmony,” was incurably deaf. Disraeli, when 
a young member, was hissed down in the 
‘House of Commons. He said: “I have begun 
many times many things, and have succeeded 
in them at last. I shall sit down now, but 
the time will come when you will hear me.” 
Disraeli persevered until he became leader of 
the Commons, chancellor of the exchequer, 
and premier of England, and the whole world 
listened to him. } 

Christ was no Teacher of easy ways. He 
urged a gospel of striving. There was no 
deceit in his counsels. He warned all men 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 101 
that the gate to eternal life is “exceedingly 


narrow, and that the price of entering in is 
that of ceaseless and athletic moral effort. 
He is the supreme Exemplar of his own teach- 
ings. His path of duty led him through pov- 
erty, persecution, betrayal, and ended only 
at the cross. The Revelator, seeing a great 
company of elect saints standing near the 
throne, asked, “And who are these?” The 
angel guide said to him: “These are they who 
have come up through great tribulation, who 
have washed their robes, and have made them 
white in the blood of the Lamb.” 


“They climbed the steep ascent of heaven 
Through peril, toil, and pain.” 


iil 

The term “character” in its original uses 
was a synonym for enduring qualities. It 
suggests the work of the engraver’s chisel on 
the rock. It is in itself a wrought permanence 
which neither time, nor storm, nor changing 
customs can obliterate. With the growth of 
thought the term has been exalted and reserved 
for expressing the more decisive human qual- 
ities—the native and acquired qualities of the 
human soul. In its final and shaping result 
character for the most part is what the indi- 
vidual makes of and for himself. Inhering in 


102 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


the very law of development, desire and thought 
from their most plastic beginnings prompt to 
action. Action often repeated begets habit 
—but habit reveals the psychological strata 
of the soul’s growth, upward or downward. 
There are good habits and bad habits. But 
the characters resulting from these habits » 
respectively are, in final goal, as widely sun- 
dered as the zenith and nadir of moral destiny. 
These statements are no outworn truisms. 
The moral universe affirms them. The united 
and timeless voice of the Hebrew prophets 
has reuttered them to the ages. Jesus, and all 
the transcendent souls of the race, have put 
upon them imperative emphasis. History pro- 
nounces its final eulogies only upon men who 
have stood heroically, unswervingly, morally 
foursquare to their age. 

There is a moral instinct implanted in the 
human constitution which prompts all men in 
the final court to pronounce unbribable ap- 
proval of truth and right as against all interests 
and all comers. The most valuable asset of 
all society is in men of clear vision, of unswerv- 
ing moral loyalties, men whose daily lives in 
presence of all their fellows are a living demon- 
stration of the value of unsullied ideals and 
of noble conduct. Very anciently a wise seer 
discerned that “A good name is rather to be 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 103 


chosen than great riches.” This saying has 
proven sane for all ages: it has never been 
revised downward by the moral judgment of 
mankind. Luther said, “The prosperity of a 
country depends, not on the abundance of 
its revenues, nor on the strength of its forti- 
fications, nor on the beauty of its public 
buildings; but it consists in the number of its 
cultivated citizens, in its men of education, 
enlightenment, and character; here are to be 
found its true interests, its chief strength, 
its real power.” Emerson said: “Character is 
moral order seen through the medium of an 


individual nature.... Men of character are 
the conscience of the society to which they 
belong.” 


But the price of character is that of eternal 
and vigilant diligence. The moral oppor- 
tunities of life may be likened to a rich garden 
site. Its ideal development calls for the land- 
scaper’s skill. Its soil must be enriched and 
sown with the choicest seeds. Every noxious 
and alien growth must be plucked up. It 
calls for assiduous cultivation of all that is 
best, most fitting and beautiful for its entire 
inclosure. It admits of no neglect, no sham- 
ming. The way of least resistance for the 
garedner is simply to neglect his garden. But, 
if so, he shall have finally only a growth of 


104 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


weeds and brambles. And so the price of 
ideal character is that of eternal watchfulness, 
of unceasing self-culture. The way of “least 
resistance” in character is simply to surrender 
oneself to the gravitations of appetite, of 
selfish desire, and of indolent ease. But this 
is always a downward way, and its inevitable 
goal is moral bankruptcy. 


IV 


_ An old classical proverb declares, “The gods 
sell ali things at a fair price.” It might be 
stated as a corollary fact that the gods are 
never cheated. Nature is an exact and an 
exacting banker. Her vaults are richly stored 
with native wealth. But she keeps accurate 
books. If she carries large debtors, she exacts 
from them ample collaterals. Her grain and 
fruit fields before they can be made to yield 
food for the world’s hunger must first be 
denuded of forests and rocks, must be rescued 
from swamp and morass, deeply plowed, 
fertilized, sown with precious seeds, and culti- 
vated to the very day of plucking and reaping. 
The precious stones that adorn the diadems 
of royalty, the finer metals that serve as the 
basis of mercantile exchange, must be hunted 
from the depths of earth. The less refined 
metals that enter into all technical inventions, 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 105 


that are so indispensable to all the mechanical 
appliances of civilization—these all must be 
laboriously, often perilously, mined from their 
hiding places in far-down rock and _ strata. 
Nature does not make compromises. with 
debtors. If at times and places she seems 
gratuitously generous with gifts needed for 
human sustenance, this means, as a rule, an 
inferior development of human character, as 
if nature herself would say to all the world 
that wherever she enables men to live with- 
out toil, such gifts are always at the expense 
of the nobler and more sterling qualities of 
human character. Nature’s universal method 
of making character is by strenuous processes. 
She insists that all values which enter into life 
must be strictly paid for. 

There is no evading this law. It applies 
clear around the circle of all worthy achieve- 
ment. Reduced to its last analysis, character 
is the one bedrock on which must rest all 
superstructures of worthy success. But char- 
acter itself is the greatest and most difficult 
creation of the individual. High scholarship 
means the toilsome and skilled discipline of 
the schools. The fine creations of painter and 
poet come only after repeated and unsatis- 
fying effort, only after long brooding at the 
fountain-sources of the most perfect beauty of 


106 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


art and refinement of expression. The artisan 
of highest skill can become such, not by any 
mercenary sale of his wares, but because his 
enthusiasms go out to his work, because in 
heart and soul he is wedded to ideals of excel- 
lence in achievement. | 
There is neither mental nor geographical 
short-cut to character; none to the attainment 
of worthy values. Life’s failures come largely 
from lack of moral stamina. One of the most 
conspicuous of historical allegories lends full 
confirmation to this view. The geographical 
distance from Egypt to Canaan was not far. 
If Israel had been morally equipped for smash- 
ing opposition by the way, the journey could 
have been made in a few days. But not God 
even, except by working an irrational, and 
therefore impossible, miracle, could meet the 
emergencies of the road by the instant trans- 
formation of cravens into battle-winning heroes. 
Israel was lacking in moral discipline, in patri- 
otic ideals, in trained endurance for the inev- 
itable fatigues and conflicts of the advance, 
and was therefore incapable of being marched 
in the direct and shortest route to the Prom- 
ised Land. Moses, peerless statesman and 
organizer, could do nothing else with this 
people but to lead them forward by the long 
detour of wilderness and desert. Even so, 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 107 


this generation was a herd and not a civiliza- 
tion. Its very bones were left to whiten on 
the desert sands. 

This historic story carries its unchanging 
lessons for all intellectual and moral life. 
Fitness must precede achievement. Masterful 
skill on every plane of creative life comes 
only from patient discipline and practice. An 
imperative lesson which should be insistently 
impressed upon the thought of young life is 
the necessity of patient preparation, of ade- 
quate schooling, for the activities and respon- 
sibilities of mature life. The young are caught 
with the outlying glamour of apparent success 
and are often neglectful of the kind of train- 
ing needed to give them steady step and poise 
along the difficult path of realization. The 
advantages of school are lightly passed, or cut 
short, in the feverish desire to take places in 
business or professional life. This attempted 
short-cut in preparation has handicapped the 
after-life of many a boy and girl, and has 
doomed them to places of ordinary achieve- 
ment. But it remains true that this early 
misdirection and loss can never be compen- 
sated for when the opportunities of youth are 
gone. Mistakes at the beginning are often 
subjects of regretful reflection in the long after- 
years. The great lawyer could truthfully say 


108 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


to the young aspirant for the profession, “My 
young friend, remember, there is always room 
at the top.” But the trail to the top is always 
dificult and toilsome. The summit is never 
reached without the climb. The crowned | 
victors of history, the heroic achievers of the 
race, are usually men of careworn brows and 
of toilworn feet, men who have made them- 
selves lean, athletic, invincible by the over- 
coming of difficulties, men who are strangers 
to indolence and who have little or no taste for 
the dissipating frivolities of idle and aimless 
living. 


V 


The goal of great purpose stands on the 
far side of sacrificial toils and testful endeavor, 
often on the other side of spaces which can be 
crossed only at the price of conflict and battle. 
Real test of character is seen in the will and 
capacity for final endurance. Failure lies in 
stopping midway of purpose. Finished suc- 
cess lies only at the end. Faithfulness unto 
death is the condition of the Christian win- 
ning of a crown of life. The deathless heroes 
of history were fighters to the end. A story 
is told of an English and a French general who 
were comparing notes concerning the merits 
of their respective armies. The one lauded 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 109 


the French soldier as the most dashing and 
brave in all the world. The Englishman agreed 
with him, but said, “The peculiarity of the 
British Johnnie is that he is brave just a 
half-hour longer than any other soldier.” 
Wellington at Waterloo said to his lieutenants, 
“Gentlemen, this is dreadful pounding; but all 
depends on which army can stand it the 
longer.” It was this spirit that characterized 
General Grant when before Petersburg and 
Richmond he said, ““We will fight it out on 
this line if it takes all summer.”’ 

Heroism of endurance to the end has in- 
spired the abiding eulogies of history, has 
monumented the grounds of the world’s noblest 
achievements. Dante in Florence, like a 
| Hebrew prophet, urged moral reform upon the 
Italian people. The ecclesiastical authorities 
arrested and banished him. But while he ate 
the bread and drank the waters of exile, the 
stars of heaven still shone upon him. He was 
offered restoration to citizenship and high 
ecclesiastical awards if he would return to 
Florence, but on condition that he would 
acknowledge and recant his criminality against 
the state. He replied, “If by this way only 
can I return to Florence, then Florence shall 
never again be entered by me.” He wrote 
his immortal epics and died in banishment. 


110 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


Just recently the world has celebrated the 
six hundredth anniversary of his death. In 
a later century Nicolo Lombardi, the foremost 
architect of his time, designed for Dante’s 
tomb the floral relief and the bust, a design © 
of highest artistic excellence. This tomb is 
to-day one of the moral shrines of the world 
at which “poet and statesman, warriors and 
nobles, journey that they may pay homage 
to the man who six centuries ago in his works 
and in his life stood for upright resolve, moral 
courage, and integrity of character.”’ 

John Wesley began his evangelical career 
visited with scorn and ostracism from the 
authorities of the very church in which he 
was born and reared. In his inspired mission 
he faced popular mobs and mocking opposi- 
tion; but he rode horseback on his ceaseless 
journeyings, until at eighty-eight years of age 
he died the most loved and honored man of 
England, having achieved the most signal 
evangelical triumphs since the apostolic age. 

Francis Asbury, ““The Prophet of the Long 
Road,” forded unbridged rivers, threaded path- 
less forests, encountered nameless privations, 
perils, and toils, in his mission of laymg the 
foundations in America of a Christian republic. 
Undaunted by any and all obstacles, unre- 
laxing under the frequent pressure of physical 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 111 


weariness and weakness, a homeless wanderer, 
he pushed on in his marvelous journeyings 
until old age and a literally worn-out body 
were met by the release of death. To-day 
his memorial as the foremost Christian apostle 
of America, and a great builder of its civiliza- 
tion, stands conspicuously in bronze in the 
capital of the nation. 

Paul, the converted little Jew of Tarsus, 
moved incessantly on his mission to the Gen- 
tile world personally to meet with prodigious 
and indescribable privations, perils, persecu- 
tions, and sufferings, and finally martyrdom. 
He stands to-day historically a well-nigh peer- 
less moral hero. His inspiring and uplifting 
influence upon human life and thought has 
widened and grown with the centuries, and 
is at present a force immeasurable. After his 
triumphant testimony that he had kept the 
faith, and had fought life’s moral battle to a 
finish, he was led forth from a Roman dungeon 
and beheaded on the Appian Way. Supposing 
that when he was stoned and left for dead 
outside the gates of Lystra he had lost his 
courage; that when he was scourged and im- 
prisoned at Philippi he had said, “I will no 
more name the name of Christ’; that when 
he was in the Mamertine dungeon at Rome 
he had petitioned to Nero for his liberty at 


112 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


the price of renouncing his apostolic mission 
—in such case the world would not now even 
know of his name. No! He kept his faith 
invincibly to the end. Beyond the dark and — 
damp of the dungeon, beyond the gleam of 
the executioner’s sword, he beheld the victor’s 
crown. 

We cannot enter this zone of thought with- 
out reminder of the Supreme Example. Jesus 
Christ came into this world to fulfill the one 
transcendent mission of history. No imagina- 
tion can picture the disaster which would have 
resulted from his failure. Duty—duty loyally 
performed—was for him supreme, a_ word 
written upon the stars and on the very dust 
at his feet. He early foresaw the tragedy of 
his way, and there were times when it weighed 
with extreme oppressiveness upon his human 
heart. But unswervingly, unfalteringly, he 
pursued his appointed path, until finally upon 
a cross he uttered the expiring cry, “It is 
finished.” 

It is not enough that the young begin 
responsible life with high ideals, large am- 
bitions, and noble purposes. The untried 
troops enlisted for the war, clad in new and 
clean uniforms, their weapons polished and 
bright, marching with buoyant step and enthu- 
siastic purpose—these attract our vision and 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 1138 


awaken expectation. But their soldierly qual- 
ity, their enduring courage, their staying 
power, remain to be tested on the battlefield, 
The grilling tests of life await all young candi- 
dates for success. It is a glory of young life 
that it is inspired with visions of achievement, 
that its enthusiasms run high. It enters the 
arena with undaunted confidence. All this 
is needed. Without these stimulations the 
young would stand nerveless and defeated at 
the very beginning of life’s conflicts. But the 
young are inexperienced. They are but 
apprentices in life’s school. Their discern- 
ment and judgment of qualities remain to be 
developed in the stern training school of expe- 
rience. They are hot-blooded, temptible, and 
adventurous. They cannot escape the peril 
of mistakes. Their high ideals, ambitions, 
their very integrity, will be assaulted by 
unanticipated forces. Their spiritual loyalties 
need to be rock-sure. Unless they have 
acquired a judgment and a love for high 
values—the good, the true, and the beautiful 
—they are in jeopardy of moral failure in early 
career. And, alas, how many of them fail! 
There is much said about the wreckage of 
the young. Their failures are strewn all along 
the social coasts. The facts are mournful, 
depressing, tragic. But the story of failure is 


114 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


by no means confined to'the young. Moral 
tragedies that shock and hurt whole commun- 
ities are perhaps more often reported in the 
sudden downfall of men and women of mature 
and later life. These later periods are pecu- 
liarly exposed to evil temptation. They are 
life’s burden-bearing periods, periods when men 
fight for bread to keep the wolf from the doors 
of the domestic households, when serious 
responsibilities multiply. They are, for many, 
periods of drastic competition, of disastrous 
business ventures. If a business man in 
middle life loses his footing, he, in most cases, 
faces a bankrupt and dreary future. But 
material failure is far from the worst. The 
tragedies of moral downfall in mature life are 
among the most shocking and depressing 
chapters in social history. The storms beat 
most heavily upon human life at its most vital 
periods. The truth is, as Carlyle long ago 
declared, that the Maker has not planned to 
make life easy for his human children. Life 
may have its playful instincts, its playful 
hours, its playhouses—all legitimate—but, in 
the long run, life is no play-day. From its 
first responsible morning to its end it is a 
stern school of character. The prizes of char- 
acter are not to be laid as pawns upon the 
gambling table. They are to be supremely 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 115 


sought, studiously planned for, toiled for, and 
when won are to be guarded and reenforced 
at every pass of life to its very end. 


““Heaven is not reached by a single bound; 
But we build the ladder by which we rise 
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies, 
And we mount to its summit round by round. 


“We rise by the things that are under our feet; 
By what we have mastered of good and gain; 
By the pride deposed and the passion slain, 

And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet.” 


VI 

The insistent and imperative question will 
be urged, and rightfully: “Where shall the 
individual find his training school for his best 
achievement in personal character?” Life 
itself is a moral opportunity. It is God’s 
chief capitalization to each individual. Every 
man is a responsible steward for the uses he 
shall make of this endowment. One’s daily 
vocation is a school both of opportunity and of 
character. A man nowhere meets with more 
challenging or subtle tests of moral strength, no- 
where with more decisive opportunities for self- 
discipline, than in his own life workshop. Ifa 
man does not demonstrate a fine integrity here, 
then he need not be expected to show this in any 
other relation. This law applies to all normal 
callings, from the highest to the lowliest. If 


116 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


one attends church on Sunday, and in appear- 
ance devoutly lays his offerings upon the 
altars of worship, and then on Monday goes — 
into the exchange to compromise with con- 
science for the swelling of unethical fortunes, 
his Sunday worship is a hollow mockery. He 
himself is no better than one who would steal 
“the livery of the court of Heaven to serve 
the devil in.” 

The humblest toiler is to be measured by 
the same test. The time was when the stand- 
ards of the craftsman were synonymous with 
the finest creative skill. The enduring monu- 
ments of this ideal appear in the miracles of 
art wrought in stone and bronze. There is 
a suspicion wide abroad that these standards 
have been sadly departed from and degraded 
in much of the ideal and practice of modern 
labor. In so far as this suspicion is true, it 
represents nothing less than a tragedy of 
civilization. The demand for “high wages, 
short hours, and a limited output” is utterly 
vicious. The laborer who deliberately shams 
or limits his work is playing in the role of 
his own soul’s enemy. He not only wrongs 
his employer by exacting a maximum wage 
for dishonest and insufficient work, but he is 
certainly bankrupting his own integrity. It 
is a thing of least importance that he cheat 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 117 


his employer. He is for himself committing 
moral suicide. If he is dishonest as a work- 
man, he can be relied upon for personal honor 
in no other relations. The brand of his moral 
spuriousness will reveal itself in every rela- 
tion in life—in the home, in society, in citizen- 
ship. He goes through life with averted moral 
vision; he does not look Truth in the face. 

This is not to say one word against the 
legitimacy of the labor union. In a world 
where capitalistic greed has undertaken to 
treat labor as a mercantile commodity, to 
reduce men to the level of machinery—in 
such a world labor has a divine right of revolt, 
of organized protest. But the legislation of 
the labor union should be based on righteous- 
ness and justice. The union that undertakes 
to level the highest skill to the lowest grades 
of ability, that demands an output of product 
far below the capacity of the worker, that 
countenances an inferior quality of product, 
and at the same time exacts a high wage for 
poor service—such a union, whatever its 
power, is a school of moral deterioration, a 
debaucher of morals. 

The matter of character is not a question 
of social or business rank. In all ranks and 
grades of social or business life it is a ques- 
tion of personal integrity, of loyalty to duty, 


118 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


of true alignment with the right, the true, 
and the good. High place and exceptional — 
achievement may seem admirable and even 
enviable in themselves. But the inevitable 
allotments of life assign most people to rela- 
tively common rank and work in the social 
and industrial worlds. If genius were universal, 
it would not be exceptional. Mr. Lincoln 
said, ““The Lord must be fond of the common 
people, he has made so many of them.” The 
real field for heroic character is with the 
masses and on the common planes of life. 
And here in abounding measure it is really to 
be found. The victorious general is signal- 
ized and lauded in popular praise; but there 
is focused on him an honor which really belongs 
to the rank and file of his army. With firm 
forward tread, with an unwavering endurance 
which still fights on when the dead and the 
dying lie thick on the field, the massed sol- 
diers, dying but never retreating, march breast 
forward until the foe is driven from their front. 


*Storm’d at with shot and shell, 
Theirs not to make reply, 


Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die.” 


Were it not for the quiet, heroic, staying 
power of the common soldier, no starred gen- 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 119 


eral would ever ride from the battlefield 
laureled in victory. 

The true domestic loyalties of the home is 
a common glory of the common life. With all 
the menaces of divorce and of domestic infi- 
delity so notoriously aired in the vulgar press, 
the average home is so guarded in affection, 
in loyalty, in true virtue as still to remain 
the most invincible institution in civilization. 
There is something passingly admirable in the 
quiet and heroic spirit in which the common 
laborer goes forth to his daily toil, and toils 
and toils patiently on while strength endures, 
for the sake of winning shelter, bread, and 
raiment for his family. And equal praise be- 
longs to the wives and mothers of the poor. 
Women beyond numbers, insouled with native 
refinement, live within a scanty income, without 
luxuries, clad in humble garb, give themselves 
to incessant toil by daylight and lamplight for 
the sake of keeping clean homes, for the right 
training of childhood, always breathing a brave 
and inspiring spirit upon husband and household. 

Indeed, notwithstanding all the vicious and 
demoralizing ideals which assault organized 
labor, the vast majority of workers are hero- 
ically loyal to duty. The humble and isolated 
man stationed in the light-towers on dark 
and stormy coasts, never permits his lights 


120 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


to grow dim. One may ticket himself through 
on a palace express train from New York to 
Los Angeles. This act, whether consciously so 
or not, is an act of faith; it is a tribute of 
confidence in the trustworthiness of human 
nature. Stationed on this long distance are 
thousands of humble and humbly paid men 
whose sole duty it is to watch the switches. 
Any one of them neglectful of his simple duty 
might precipitate a tragedy which would cost 
a hundred lives. But not one in a thousand 
in a thousand days and nights of all these 
unheralded men either neglects or forgets his 
duty, and the privileged passengers of the 
palace train ride the continent in safety. 

And how many domestic servants are there 
in whose life there would seem so little sun- 
shine, whose lot is commonly counted as one 
of monotony and essential drudgery, yet who 
are as loyal to their employers as life itself! 

If we have any correct picture at all for 
estimating God’s measurement of merit, that 
picture emphasizes the spirit in which one 
does his work rather than the size or the fame 
of the work itself. He that is faithful in little 
will be faithful also in much. In Christ’s 
picture of final awards, involving the destinies 
of eternity, he emphasizes the deeds and 
motives of which men in this life have taken 


WAYS OF LEAST RESISTANCE 121 


little notice. “Inasmuch as ye have done it 
unto the least of these, ye have done it unto 
me.” Men are given to hero worship, worship 
of spectacular actors on the stage. God looks 
upon life’s inner motives. He immortalizes 
the worth of the widow’s mite. 

Among the chief things which Christ’s per- 
sonal history emphasizes is the moral possi- 
bilities of the commonplace. His parents 
were unknown peasants of a despised province. 
He was born in a stable. He spent the first 
thirty years of his life as a toiler in a rude 
carpenter shop. He never held political office, 
never led an army, never saw a university. 
But he went forth from this humble back- 
ground to be the Founder of spiritual empire, 
to place himself upon the moral throne of 
history. The ages have fled. Great thrones 
and empires have fallen. New continents have 
been discovered, now thronged with mighty 
civilizations. Marvels of nature-controlling 
inventions have been evolved. Sciences which 
have made man master of earth, and air, and 
sea, and which have furnished to mankind 
new patterns of thought, have been born. 
But Jesus Christ historically is transcendently 
the moral Teacher and Master of the ages. 
His spiritual empire is the mightiest force in 
the world. He is famed as not all other his- 


122 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


toric characters. The present broken and 
troubled world is looking to him as not to all 
other deliverers. The prophecy of his ultimate 
triumph was never so bright, never so buoyant 
as to-day. Christ will continue increasingly to 
reign until he has put all enemies under his 
feet, until all peoples of all realms, of every 
kindred and tribe of earth shall acclaim him 
as President of presidents, as Ruler of rulers. 


O Man! Wheresoe’er thy place, 
See thou do well thy work, 
Nor slightest duty shirk; 
Ne’er from the Truth depart. 
In ev’ry task take heart: 
Thou doest all before God’s face. 


Forces that gird the soul with might 
Themselves are surely wrought 
In molds of loyal thought; 
In the doing of deeds 
That relieve human needs: 
So shalt thou walk in noonday light. 


If thou with loyal will pursue 
To the close of the day, 
To the end of the way, 
Living, as in God’s sight, 
Alone for Truth and Right: 
Then God will guide thy journey through. 


Thy course of life will soon be run. 
The passing seasons fly, 
With them thou soon must die; 
Then ends earth’s toil and grief, 
Life’s mortal day is brief: 

Thy deathless crown will soon be won. 


IV 
THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 


MopeErRN science carries a white searchlight 
into every department of nature from astron- 
omy to psychology. It has pushed the fron- 
tiers of the universe outward into infinite and 
unimaginable distances; traced the creative 
processes back through countless eons to 
dateless beginnings. The magnitudes and mar- 
vels of the material universe would seem to 
dwarf man into insignificance. But this is a 
fallacious impulse. The created universe is 
a measureless immensity, peopled throughout 
with countless myriads of microscopic wonders. 
But in it all, there is nothing intellectually 
and morally great but—MAN. 


“This that we see—this casual glimpse within 

The seething pit of space; these million stars 

And worlds in making, these are naught but matter; 
These are but the dust of our feet; 

And we who gaze forth fearless on the sight 

Find not one equal, facing from the vast 

Our sentient selves. Not one, sole, lonely star 

In all that infinite glitter and deep light 

Can make one conscious movement: all are slaves 
To law material, immutable.” 


123 


124 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


“In these souls of ours triumphant dwells 
Some segment of the large Creative Power— 
A thing beyond the things of sight and sense: 
A strength to think, a force to conquer force. 
One are we with the ever-living One.” 


There can be no study so important, no 
science so useful, as that which yields the most 
perfect knowledge of man himself. Yet it is 
comparatively but yesterday since biological 
science came to a clear discovery and demon- 
stration of the fateful and grave sway of hered- 
ity in the transmission of human life. Man’s 
source and continuance are conditioned upon 
two distinct cell-types—the germ cell, the 
genetic source of a new human personality, and 
carrying in itself with a kind of infallible 
validity the habits and characters of ancestral 
lines; the other, the body cell whose function 
chiefly is, to contribute to the physical life of 
its carrier. The germ cell is aristocratic, 
occupying its own exclusive departments in 
the system, and having no other function but 
to carry in itself the potency of a new life, and 
to be the fateful transmitter to that life of the 
qualities of an ancestral past. We have here 
a fact more wonderful in itself than any dream 
in the classic mythologies. Its lessons are as 
grave as those of Sinai. They hold in them- 
selves the fate of civilizations. 


THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 125 


In any attempt at distinctive appraisement 
of these lessons, due place must always be given 
to the real effects of environment in situations. 
Indeed, room must be given for the interplay 
upon the whole process of that mysterious 
force which shelters itself under the evolu- 
tionary principle. Wrapped up within bio- 
logical processes there is an operative cause, 
or causes, which, by the introduction of variable 
factors, works either toward the perfecting 
or deterioration of results otherwise to be 
expected. The otherwise inflexible law of 
heredity is by this interaction subject to 
gradual modifications toward betterment or 
degeneracy of ends. Life is played upon 
by many forces, but in the long run the dom- 
inant influences will store and report them- 
selves in the genetic cells. This subject is now 
being discussed in whole volumes by expert 
minds. It is exceedingly fruitful of suggestion. 
Within the limits of their paper little more can 
be done than simply to call attention to a few 
of its grave lessons. 


A lesson of momentous significance is, that 
the germ cell lodges with the coming child 
basic qualities of temperament and character 
which may ever after largely, perhaps effect- 
ually, baffle all efforts of parental or cultural 


126 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


nurture. The ancestral qualities which hered- 
ity carries to the unborn child may lend them- 
selves either in cooperation with, or in granitic 
resistance against, all after attempts toward 
the cultural shaping of character. And this 
is one of the gravest revelations of science. 


II 


Ideal heredity is a firm ally of physical 
righteousness. Its fundamental premise is a 
sound body as the home of a sane mind. Con- 
science in its universal and uncompromising 
attitude of approval or disapproval of accepted 
right or wrong is no more surely a factor in 
man’s moral constitution than does the urge 
for sound physical health inhere in the ideal 
heredity. The possibility of projecting improve- 
ment into the hereditary line—a_ possibility 
which I think must be conceded—may be both 
a call and an encouragement to would-be 
parents. As the quality of a stream flowing 
from a distant source may be modified by the 
incoming of a new estuary, so immediate 
parentage must make its own distinctive con- 
tribution to the heredity of offspring. Every 
new mating for the foundation of a coming 
family must contribute some distinctive quality 
to the hereditary trend. While the chief 
emphasis of this fact calls for wise selections in 


THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 127 


marriage, yet it is also a serious call to parents 
to exercise most studious care as to the kind of 
prenatal contribution they may mutually give 
to their offspring. 

Modern humane ideals have given birth to 
much of both teaching and practice with the 
aim of preserving the lives of infants born of 
a frail or defective physical heredity. Vast 
study has been given to sanitation, nutrition, 
and to skilled nursing as conditions for securing 
life and health for such children. All this is as 
it should be. Standards less than this would 
be akin to barbarism. Still, nevertheless, 
nature is on the side of the strong-born. All 
working laws, so far as known, seem to have 
exceptions. Now and then a child of mutually 
frail parents lives to old age. But this is the 
marked exception. Most babies born from 
weakly parents, though through scientific 
nursing preserved to full growth, die in early 
life, and this in the ratio of five to one as com- 
pared with those born of a strong and long- 
lived parentage. Physical heredity as a con- 
dition of health and long life is many times 
over more decisive than all medical and san- 
itary arts in the absence of such conditions. 

Ideal heredity is closely akin to ideal right- 
eousness of character. It belongs to the same 
family as the morality of Sinai. It is 


128 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


immensely prohibitory. It demands clean 
blood. It imperatively calls for individual 
exemption from all “‘filthiness of flesh and 
spirit,” freedom from evil appetites, from 
impure imaginations, from indulgence in for- 
bidden and lawless passions, from everything 
which may defile the spirit or vitiate the 
springs of physical health. If this is Puri- 
tanic, then the ideal heredity is a Puritan of 
the Puritans. It promises long life, full-tided 
health and happiness only to those who keep 
its commandments. In trumpet-tones it de- 
clares that such alone can be the fit progenitors 
of an ideal race. 


iil 


Ideal heredity keeps company with and 
lends creative support to high intelligence. 
It is perhaps too early to define in a. strict 
scientific sense the exact and causal relations 
between heredity and intelligence. But de- 
cided demonstrations show that the governing 
trends of a good heredity are always promotive 
of a clear understanding. A too-common fal- 
lacy is that keen intellect is likely to be asso- 
ciated with unscrupulous character. This is 
about on a par with that other too-common but 
low-bred lie that the sons of preachers are 
likely to turn out bad. A law, and not its 


THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 129 


exceptions, is the fact to be emphasized in 
human affairs. Albert Edward Wiggam gives 
high rank to heredity in preachers’ families. 
Referring to the “Hall of Fame,” to which 
every candidate for its honors undergoes a 
most judicial scrutiny, he reminds us that of 
the first fifty-one admitted to the acknowledged 
rank of genius, ten of them, twenty per cent, 
were the sons and daughters of preachers. As 
there is only about one preacher to every five 
hundred people, thus the son or daughter of a 
preacher stands from twenty-five to fifty times 
the chance of becoming a great leader as a 
son or daughter selected at random from the 
general community. Tennyson, Emerson, 
Lowell, Holmes, and Richard Watson Gilder 
were all sons of preachers. 

Professor Frederick Adams Woods, a fore- 
most authority on heredity, has, among other 
notable investigations, made a searching study 
of the effects of heredity upon the royal families 
of Europe. Royal families, as a matter of 
prudential policy, have long pursued the cus- 
tom of intermarrying in selective circles. In 
flippant democratic thought it has been much 
the fashion to depreciate royalty as prevail- 
ingly degenerate morally and of mediocre 
mentality. Here too a knowledge of facts 
thoroughly disproves the premise. 


130 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


Wood’s investigations range through a period 
of five centuries and are confined to fourteen 
families. It is a significant thing that from a 
limited number of eight hundred persons of 
royal breed there were developed as many 
as one in forty to whom united history assigns 
real genius. These superlative intellects sprang 
from royal blood in the proportion of one from 
every forty. The significance of this showing 
somewhat appears when it is remembered 
that for the past five centuries in all Europe 
aside from royal blood there has not been 
produced probably more than one high-rank 
genius, or person who has put upon history 
the enduring impress of transcendent intel- 
lect, to every million of all the people. A good 
and high heredity means a good and high 
quality of brains. Brains, as a matter of 
manifest destiny, will control the social and 
national life of mankind. Brains plus mor- 
ality will create the beneficent and abiding 
civilizations of the future. 


IV 
Heredity imperatively urges eugenic mar- 
riage. This is an urge that lays hold upon 
the very foundations of human destiny. This 
does not mean that eugenic marriage is to be 
decided by the decrees of states or by acts of 


THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 131 


Legislatures. It must come about, if at all, 
from the widest dissemination of scientific 
intelligence concerning the fateful and unes- 
capable laws of human transmission. All men 
are in the currents of destiny. Each receives 
into himself as an antenatal inheritance qual- 
ities, good or bad, which may be traced back 
as potential forces of character over long 
ancestral lines. If a woman of queenly genius 
weds herself to a man of inferior quality, she 
thereby forfeits her right to anticipate in her 
children a reproduction of her own brilliant 
qualities. She has mingled her own repro- 
ductive endowments with degenerate clay. 

If insanity, epilepsy, the taint of impure 
sexualism, tubercular susceptibility, or any 
one of many other deteriorative qualities, 
inhere in the direct or collateral lines of ancestral 
blood, then, for all contemplating marriage, 
these should be conditions for searching scru- 
tiny, and should be sanely measured in the 
light of their potential consequences. The 
seeds of these ills are sure to be borne down 
in the currents of heredity, and they carry only 
the menace of disaster to posterity. If struc- 
tural weaknesses of mind or body characterize 
an ancestral group, these conditions cannot 
be safely ignored. Weak and _ short-lived 
children come from the mating of defective 


132 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


parents. Vigorous and long-lived children come 
from a clean-blooded and robust stock. What- 
ever men and women sow, that inevitably 
must they also reap. A_ stupid parentage 
never produces brilliant offspring. A bad 
pedigree does not produce a good breed. A 
hereditary defect in one or both parents is 
perilously liable to reproduce itself in their 
posterity. If men and women of disparate 
physical or mental force marry, the law is, 
that their children will average on a plane of 
descent toward the less endowed personality. 


V 


The fate of democracies is vitally bound 
up in heredity. The American republic was 
founded by men of a sifted intellectual and 
moral stock—men of most knowing, of finest 
moral type, and of most liberty-loving purpose, 
to which the civilizations of Western Europe 
had given birth. Their experiment in govern- 
ment was a marked departure both in form and 
spirit from all systems of the past. It was a 
momentous adventure in history. It was 
judged by the Old World as a visionary move- 
ment, doomed to short life. The statesmen of 
Europe viewed it with a sense of mingled scorn 
and derision. It was, however, a movement 
worthy of prophetic genius. For nearly a 


THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 133 


century and a half of years, from small begin- 
nings, this republic has advanced until to-day 
it stands unchallenged the mightiest among 
nations. The guarantee of its perpetuity, 
however, does not inhere in the wealth of its 
material resources. As was clearly foreseen 
and emphasized by the founders, the security 
of a republic is conditioned fundamentally 
and vitally upon a high intelligence, morality, 
and patriotism inhering with its sovereign 
citizenship. A democracy has no guarantee 
of secure life in the absence of these qualities. 
Whatever hopes we may cherish for the future 
of the nation—and these hopes would appear 
to be many—it would still be fatuous to shut 
our eyes to existing menaces against our 
national life. And of all menaces there is 
none more formidable than that of a poor 
heredity which has come into our national 
life-blood. 

Our most populous city in 1920 reported a 
population above ten years of age of 4,522,689, 
of whom 281,12] were totally illiterate. Of 
the native white population, numbering more 
than half of the total, there were reported in 
all but 6,552 illiterates, thus showing that a 
vast preponderance of illiteracy in our most 
populous city inheres with its foreign importa- 
tions of citizenship. 


134 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


At about the period of the founding of the 
republic, in the entire State of Massachusetts 
there was scarcely a child above ten years of 
age who could not both read and write. In 
1920, this old State—the State of great col- . 
leges—with a population of 3,161,769 above 
ten years of age reported illiterates to the 
number of 146,607. Here also the great pre- 
ponderance of illiterates was with the foreign- 
born. 

In the entire nation of 82,739,315 persons 
above ten years of age, the number of illiterates 
reaches the astounding mass of nearly 5,000,000! 
Yet a great majority of all this mass is either 
now, or soon to be, in possession of the badge 
of sovereign citizenship! 

There is some skepticism as to the reliability 
of intelligence tests as applied to enlisted men 
in the recent war. With a considerable allow- 
ance, however, for an over-induction from 
these methods they present very grave prob- 
lems of citizenship. They indicate that a 
large percentage of our present population is 
lacking in capacity to master any close proc- 
esses of reason, and that a very much larger 
number still will never rise to any broad and 
clear appreciation of the meaning and obliga- 
tions of their citizenship. They grimly teach 
that from the great body of our suffrage there 


THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 135 


is only a minor proportion who have at once 
the clear-headed and constructive capacity 
for a safe partnership in conducting the vital 
affairs of the nation. 

Manifestly, citizenship in a democracy should 
come from the best heredities; its propagation 
should come controllingly from the most fit. 
Facts would seem to indicate that the univer- 
sity bred men of America are not even repro- 
ducing their own numbers in posterity. As a 
whole, the descendants of the founders of the 
republic—the direct heirs of our best national 
traditions—are raising increasingly small fam- 
ilies. The highest intelligence of the nation is 
reproducing itself in a diminishing ratio of 
numbers. This on the side of our most cul- 
tured and competent citizenship. As com- 
pared with this trend, the illiterate and the 
mentally mediocre are reproducing themselves 
in the ratio of about three to one. The logic 
of the situation is oppressively obvious. If 
more children are born of an inferior heredity 
than are produced from an intelligent and 
patriotic parentage, then this in itself measured 
is the prophecy of nothing less than a sure and 
fatal undermining of American democracy. 

In this brief discussion I have made no 
attempt to assay the factors of safety for our 
national future. I believe that such factors 


186 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


both potently and potentially exist. But I am 
profoundly impressed that no single danger 
more seriously confronts the republic than that 
which inheres in a majority citizenship itself 
sprung from an inferior mental and moral 
heredity. 


VI 


I could not wish in this essay to contribute 
any sense of pessimistic hopelessness to those 
whose heredity may handicap them in life’s 
race. We are not here primarily to fight the 
battles of our wicked or misdirected ancestors. 
Each, by exercise of his best judgment, and by 
wise selective mating if at all, is under bonds 
to make the most possible of his own life. 
The mentally deficient should not be permitted 
to mate, much less propagate their own kind. 
Persons inheriting structural physical weak- 
ness or pronounced susceptibility to heredi- 
tary diseases should certainly not mate with 
persons like exposed. If persons insist upon 
marrying in known disregard of these con- 
ditions, Dean Inge, an eminent student in this 
field, goes so far as to insist that such should 
be restrained by the state. Every young man, 
every young woman, a candidate for marriage, 
should intelligently insist upon mating only 
with a person of known healthy physical 


THE SOVEREIGN HEREDITY 137 


antecedents. Further, it should be the aspi- 
ration of every person of both sexes to mate as 
far as possible with those of high endowment. 
If this ideal were studiously adhered to, the 
light of a redemptive heredity would soon rest 
upon civilization. 

On this whole momentously grave question 
science has pronounced a new revelation. 
The law of a better race, physically, mentally, 
morally, has come clearly in possession of 
human knowledge. It is a supreme obligation 
of civilization to translate this law with all its 
sanctions into the popular thought. All per- 
sons who are to be the progenitors of the race 
ought to be intelligently concerned about the 
sacred laws of human heredity and absolutely 
observant of those laws. 

Ideal heredity, for its ultimate ends, speaks 
with the authority of moral law. In its final 
purpose, by its own processes, and within its 
own field, it is a department of God’s redemp- 
tive gospel. God has ordained a harmonious 
partnership between Christianity and Science, 
and their voices unite in the prophecy of a 
perfected humanity which shall yet citizen 
the earth. 


V 
A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 


Tue question of the varying functions of 
inspiration is one quite different from the fact 
of inspiration itself. It may be emphasized 
that the chief field of imspiration is in the 
sphere of religion, as relating to man’s spir- 
itual, moral, and ethical nature. It is in this 
field certainly that a distinctive divine illu- 
mination must be of highest value and necessity 
to man. 

But God’s relations to the race are certainly 
vastly extended beyond what are ordinarily 
embraced in the terms of our spiritual vocab- 
ulary. God deals with entire world interests. 
He relates himself to man’s intellectual life, to 
the processes of history and of civilization, in 
ways that far transcend our mental measure- 
ments. The quality of inspiration, while of 
most diversified application, would seem as 
certainly requisite, and not less worthy of a 
divine activity, for the illumination of thought 
processes, for the development of learning, of 
invention, of poetry, of art, of government, 


and for all the advances of civilization—just 
138 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION — 139 


as certainly a necessity for the growing life 
of the race as in the more distinctively spiritual 
relations. 

It would be a narrow view which would 
limit God’s inspirations to our measurements * 
of purely spiritual concepts. This view would 
be widely out of harmony with the entire 
trend of Old Testament teaching. The great 
prophets were inspired statesmen as well as 
spiritual teachers. Moses, when closeted alone 
with God on Sinai, was voluminously instructed 
in the architecture of the tabernacle. Ezekiel 
claimed direct inspiration, but a large part 
of his message relates to an elaborate picture 
of what he anticipates as the coming Temple. 
This picture remained a dream, never coming 
to historic materialization. Special men were 
inspired as workers in art. This is the record: 


“And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, See, 
I have called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, 
the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah: And I have 
filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in 
understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner 
of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work 
in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting 
of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to 
work in all manner of workmanship. And I, be- 
hold, I have given with him Aholiab, the son of 
Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan; and in the hearts 
of all that are wise-hearted I have put wisdom, 
that they may make all I have commanded thee.” 


140 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


Joshua was inspired and equipped as a man 
of war. Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, Gideon, and 
others were divinely ordained as the warlike 
deliverers and judges of Israel. Samson’s - 
morals, certainly as measured by Christian 
standards, were quite unideal; but the “Spirit 
of the Lord began to move him at times in 
the camp of Dan,” and he also delivered 
Israel. Balaam, a foreign soothsayer, is accred- 
ited with genuine prophetic inspirations. 
Cyrus, the most powerful pagan king of the 
ancient East, is employed as God’s agent and 
messenger in the interests of Israel, and he is 
designated as the “friend” and the “‘anointed”’ 
of Jehovah. 

In our English version of the Bible the word 
“Imspiration”’ only twice appears—once in the 
Old and once in the New Testament. In 
Job, Elihu says, “There is a spirit in man, and 
the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them 
understanding.””’ He seems to say, “A dis- 
tinctive thing in man is the spirit or faculty 
of potential intelligence; but intelligence itself 
must come from an inbreathing by a Divine 
Source.” If this statement is philosophically 
valid, then it may have widest range of appli- 
cation to the awakening of intelligent expres- 
sion. It may be that in a far wider measure 
than has been generally conceded or even 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 141 


conceived, inspiration in all fields has a common 
source. Of course discriminations of quality 
are to be made, while at the same time recog- 
nition must be given to the wide range and 
diversity of functions served by inspiration 
itself. 

There is perhaps in no single work in English 
dress a more scholarly, authoritative, and 
exhaustive treatment of the subject of inspira- 
tion than that given by the late Professor 
William Sanday in his famous Bampton Lec- 
tures. He freely admits that the Oriental, 
Greek, and Roman nations were just as cer- 
tainly sharers in God’s providence and in- 
spirations as were the people of Bible lands. 
It is not claimed that such inspirations took 
on the same form or impressed the same 
lessons as those specifically emphasized in the 
biblical message. But they were a part of 
divine illumination for the race. The science 
of comparative religions, which has come to 
wide and rich expression in our own day, very 
luminously confirms this view. 

A review of brilliant intellectual achieve- 
ments may well impress us that a factor of 
inspiration is the one thing which chiefly 
accounts for the achievements themselves. 
The genealogy of genius is obscure. ‘The 
supreme prophets, poets, artists, statesmen, 


142 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


warriors, capitalists, scientists, philosophers, 
saints—most of these have come upon the 
world like the flash of meteors in the night. - 
Yet these are the men who have discovered 
and appropriated nearly all the new provinces 
which have enriched civilization itself. Inspi- 
ration, in any valuable creative form, never 
comes to negligent and listless souls. It 
gives itself only to worshipers who bring costly 
devotion to its shrine. The prophets of Israel 
were rapt brooders over the serious problems 
and destinies of their times. And so with all 
the great discoverers of the race. In the mind 
of Columbus was the long-cherished dream of 
new lands and of potential empires lying 
behind far Western seas. Dante in his habit 
of brooding over the problems of human 
destiny neglected properly to nourish his 
own body. But his is the superlative epic 
of Catholic history. Milton was the uni- 
versal scholar of his age. He gave his very 
soul to “Paradise Lost” before it took final 
form. 

High inspiration comes to the comparatively 
few. A flash of illumination may give to one 
man in a single hour a wider vision than will 
come to another man in a life-time. Emerson 
quotes Jacob Behmen as saying concerning 
one of his inspirational experiences: “In one 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 143 


quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than 
if I had been many years together at an uni- 
versity.” Inspiration is not a quality to be 
purchased by the coins of merchandise. Its 
sources are not found in the palaces of kings, 
nor in the marts of mercantile adventure. 
Lowell says: “‘No doubt inspiration, like money, 
is a very handy thing to have, and if I should 
ever see an advertisement of any shop where 
it could be bought, even at second hand, I 
would lay in a stock of it forthwith.” Neither 
heredity, wealth, good clothes, or fine man- 
ners can pay hostages for inspiration. Neither 
kings nor the elect chosen of democracy can 
bestow it. It is best accounted for as a gift 
from God. 

In moments of ecstatic rapture the poet is 
lifted far above his ordinary self. It is as 
though an afflatus coming from beyond the 
stars has fallen upon him. In such moods 
all great poets feel their kinship with Deborah 
and the ancient psalm-singers. Music, cer- 
tainly of the highest order, falls upon the 
soul like the melody of celestial harps. Robert 
Browning, one of the most discerning seers of 
the modern age, himself a musician, did not 
hesitate to express belief that the music of 
Beethoven was a direct inspiration from God. 

Inspiration is not only the mood of excep- 


144 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


tional men, but even with them its presence 
is not always felt. The very oracles are some- 
times silent. The Hebrew Prophets had their . 
periods of inspirational dearth. The poet 
Herrick writes: 


“Tis not every day that I 
Fitted am to prophesy; 
No, but when the spirit fills 
The fantastic panicles, 
Full of fire, then I write 
As the Godhead doth indite. 
Thus enraged, my lines are hurled, 
Like Sibyl’s through the world: 
Look how next the holy fire 
Either slakes, or doth retire; 
So the fancy cools,—till when 
That brave spirit comes again.” 


The earth in its orbit sometimes passes through 
night-zones when the heavens are aflame 
with flying meteors. But this is not a con- 
stant phenomenon. So inspiration does not 
dwell in unbroken stay even with genius. 
But when its currents are flowing at full tide, 
this is an hour of a thousand. This is to dwell 
on Olympus. It gives the vision of new and 
divine creations peopling all spaces. 


I 


What is the thing to be chiefly emphasized 
in all this? Is it not the evidence it all gives 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 145 


of God’s continuous and unbroken processes in 
the world for the intellectual and moral up- 
lifting of the race? In our age we are coming 
to feel with increasing conviction that Chris- 
tianity as an end does not exhaust itself either 
in individual experience or individual interests. 
As with an inspired new emphasis we are 
coming to see that God’s kingdom in the 
earth involves a divine organization of society, 
of industry, of trade, and of commerce—the 
subsidizing of all forces which may be made 
to contribute to the larger welfare and moral 
uplifting of mankind. God is utilizing all 
agencies of enlightenment for the advancement 
of his purposes in the world. It is, moreover, 
obvious that there can be no ideal rule in the 
world which does not seek as a vital end the 
physical betterment of the race. There can 
be no ideal and effective rule among men 
which does not finally involve physical sanity 
and righteousness. This is, in last resort, a 
chief significance of science. Whatever other 
mission science may have—and no limit can 
be placed upon its power to advance enlight- 
enment and to increase knowledge—it will have 
a foremost ministry in promoting man’s physical 
welfare. It will in what are now undiscovered 
ways, banish disease, create well-ventilated and 
sanitary homes for the poor, and lay under 


PA 


A 


. , ry 


146 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


tribute invention and industrial prosperity for 
the wider distribution of human comforts. 
A fact to be kept always at the front is that 


in every department where the vision of man . 


has been clarified, where there have come 
large new ministries to life, where the spirit 
of prophecy has stimulated the race to new 
nobilities and urged it to enlarged possessions 
—the discoverer, the initiator, in every case 
has been the illuminated man. Newton was 
of transcendent mind, but the great law with 
which his name has stood for centuries came 
to him as in a flash of inspiration. The 
Copernican astronomy was born in the dreams 
of a monk. The laws of planetary motion, 
after years of incredible toil, burst upon the 
vision of Kepler in a moment that filled him 
with a very frenzy of soul. And so there has 
been no great triumph of mind, no great 
achievement in invention, no epochal dis- 
covery in science, no brilliant generalization 
in philosophy, no superlative creation in poetry, 
no immortal oratorios, no highest oratory, no 
most masterful preaching, except through 
minds made luminous with a light not seen 
on land or sea. 

God has never permitted his prophets to 
perish from the earth. Augustine, Luther, and 
Wesley are the true successors of the great 


. 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 147 


biblical masters. Lincoln, not less certainly 
than Moses, was a race-emancipator and 
statesman—God’s man. There is to-day a 
multiplying race of prophets in the earth— 
true successors of the Isaiahs and Jeremiahs. 
The Careys, the Morrisons, the Livingstones, 
and the Thoburns are the lineal successors of 
the great missionary apostle to the Gentile 
world. 

If, now, it should be suggested that, in 
parity with this reasoning, there have been 
men of evil inspirations, this is not to be 
denied. It is the tragedy of history that 
some men have always perverted God’s best 
gifts. This may apply as certainly to inspira- 
tion as to other of God’s endowments. Not- 
withstanding the perversion of the good by 
evil minds, we may still remember that God 
exercises a wonderful sovereignty in controlling 
the designs of evil men for the clearer vindica- 
tion of his own purposes. Most vicious 
onslaughts against truth have served . to 
summon to new investigations and to tri- 
umphant defenses. In great historic conflicts, 
truth has generally made steady advances, 
while error has been driven into retreat. God 
can confuse the counsels of his enemies, and 
force the mightiest to be the servants of his 
providence. He pursued the persecuting Saul 


148 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


of Tarsus until he transformed him into a 
flaming apostle of the truth. While no per- 
verted gifts are good in themselves they have 
often challenged and awakened the victories — 
of righteousness. 


II 


The philosophy, or, if preferred, the theology, 
of inspiration as applied to the Bible has had 
a varied history. While no one theory of 
biblical inspiration has ever met with uni- 
versal acceptance in the church, many vary- 
ing views, here and there and at different 
times, have been held by diverse groups of 
believers. The central and vital thing is the 
fact of divine inspiration itself. If in the 
universe there is such a God as Christian 
theism demands, then one does not have to 
travel far to reach a rational view of divine 
inspiration. It is a vital claim of Christian 
thought that God and man are linked together 
in the indissoluble partnership of a common 
nature. Man’s chief distinction is that he is 
an intellectual, moral, and spiritual person- 
ality, and that as such he holds close kinship 
with God himself. God is the infinite. Man 
is the child, but a child with limitless possi- 
bilities of development, a child with an infinite 
outlook. 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 149 


That which we familiarly term “revelation” 
is at bottom an appropriation, an appro- 
priation which ever keeps pace with man’s 
growing enlightenment, by the human mind 
and spirit from treasures of moral and _phil- 
osophical truth which with God are an infinite 
possession. The greatest fact in human knowl- 
edge is that of the mental and moral corre- 
spondence between God and man. It was 
Calvin who said, “Man can only know himself 
through his knowledge of God, and can only 
know God through the knowledge of him- 
self.” However wide our quest in historic 
fields, the fact which shall more and more 
be in evidence, and which must come to 
increasing emphasis, is the universality of 
man’s religious nature. 

It must stand as of axiomatic force that, 
correspondent to man’s universal religiousness, 
there must be a Divinity who shall be able 
to respond to the deepest religious needs. 
The Christian Scriptures proceed on _ the 
assumption that God is a Father to the entire 
human race, and that in Jesus Christ he has 
provided a perfect Teacher and Guide for all 
his human children. It can seem nothing less 
than a rational conclusion that, taking human 
nature as we know it, and God as thus won- 
derfully set forth, that God himself is under 


150 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


both a measureless prompting and obligation 
to so illuminate the minds of men as to make 
them capable of receiving the revelations of | 
his character and purpose. 

The terms “revelation” and “‘inspiration” 
while not synonymous are correlative. Rev- 
elation is the unfoldment of fact or truth. 
Inspiration is the vision of discernment, the 
capacity for seeing and interpreting such 
unfoldment. There can be no revelation 
without inspiration. Revelation in the absence 
of inspiration would be of no more avail than 
to present for his judgment the solar spectrum 
to a blind man. God has made man inspira- 
tional, the fruitful seer and interpreter of 
universal truth. The record of revelation is 
richly written upon all of God’s handiwork in 
creation; but inspired human mind is the one 
translator and interpreter of this record. 

When, however, we inquire for a distinctive 
revelation adapted to man’s uttermost and 
irrepressible spiritual needs, we can by no 
other means reach such satisfying answer as 
comes to us through the channels of Hebrew 
history. A supreme moral need of the world 
is met only in the kind of revelation recorded 
in the Bible. It should, however, still be 
emphasized that if God chose one nation as 
the special agent of his manifestation to all 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 151 


mankind, then toward all mankind aside from 
this special nation he must also in some form 
have been dealing in ways preparatory to the 
universal acceptance of this revelation. 


IIT 

In a study like this, one is tempted to tarry 
in reverent review of the rich and exhaust- 
less moral inspirations which the Bible has 
yielded to the heart and thought of the race, 
inspirations which have pervaded and uplifted 
entire civilizations. I can only pause to give 
a few illustrious individual testimonies. Dr. 
W. Robertson Smith says: “If I am asked 
why I receive the Scripture as the Word of 
God, and as the only perfect rule of faith 
and life, I answer with all the Fathers of the 
Protestant Church: Because the Bible is the 
only record of the redeeming love of God, 
because in the Bible alone I find God draw- 
ing near to man in Jesus Christ, and declar- 
ing to us in him his will for our salvation. 
And this record I know to be true by the 
witness of his Spirit, whereby I am assured 
that none other than God himself is able to 
speak such words to my soul.” 

Dr. William Sanday, recently deceased, but 
historically one of the most eminent of Eng- 
lish biblical scholars, says: “There is im- 


152 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


pressed upon the writings which make up the 
Bible a breadth and variety, an intensity and 
purity of religious life, that are without parallel 
in any other literature in the world. That is 
the fact which we seek to express in the doc- 
trine of inspiration. We know no other 
explanation for it than a special action of the 
Spirit of God.” 

Professor James Orr, a preeminent scholar, 
and one of the last of the great traditionalists 
in biblical teaching, in his final and valuable 
book on Revelation and Inspiration, says: “In 
the last resort, the proof of the inspiration of 
the Bible—not indeed in every particular, but 
in its essential message—is to be found in 
the life-giving effects which that message has 
produced, wherever its word of truth has 
gone. This is the truth in the argument for 
inspiration based on the witness of the Holy 
Spirit. The Bible has the qualities claimed 
for it as an inspired book. ‘These qualities, 
on the other hand, nothing but inspiration 
could impart. It leads to God and to Christ; 
it gives light on the deepest problems of life, 
death, and eternity; it discovers the way of 
deliverance from sin; it makes men new crea- 
tures; it furnishes the man of God completely 
for every good work. That it possesses these 
qualities history and experience through all the 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 153 


centuries have attested; its saving, sanctify- 
ing, and civilizing effects among all races of 
men in the world attest it still. The word of 
God is a pure word. It is a true and tried 
word; a word never found wanting by those 
who rest themselves upon it. The Bible that 
embraces this word will retain its distinction 
as the Book of Inspiration till the end of 
time.” 


IV 


There is space but for few of the peculiar 
views which have been held in and out of 
ecclesiastical thought concerning the character 
and processes of inspiration. ) 

Plato classes inspiration as one of the four 
forms of madness. He says: “No man, when 
in his wits, attains prophetic truth and inspira- 
tions; but when he receives the inspired word, 
either his intelligence is enthralled in sleep, 
or he is demented by some distemper or pos- 
session.” This view, however eminent its source, 
displaces the sane human reason from any 
creative copartnership in the processes of in- 
spiration. 

It has been taught that Adam in Eden was 
given the Hebrew text even to the vowel 
points. It is historically clear, however, that 
the Hebrew vowel points were not invented 


154 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


until comparatively late in the Christian era. 
As for Adam’s knowledge of Hebrew! 


An old tradition had wide prevalence that - 


during the Exile the books of Moses were lost, 
and that they were restored by Ezra through 
the Holy Ghost. Among the Alexandrian Jews 
it was traditionally believed that the Seventy 
who translated the Old Testament into Greek, 
each working separately from the others, were 
so directed that each produced a translation 
identical with that of every other man. When 
we consider the numerous variations and 
even mistranslations of the Septuagint from 
the original Hebrew, it indeed seems singular 
that the Spirit did not more accurately direct 
the minds of these translators. But the great 
Augustine gets past this difficulty by declar- 
ing that the numerous deviations from the 
original appearing in the Septuagint were 
divinely superintended in order to adapt the 
Scriptures to the heathen mind. 

In the light of claims for a strictly verbal 
inspiration of the Scriptures the usage of the 
early church would seem singular, even unac- 
countable. We not only know that the Sep- 
tuagint as a translation of the original Hebrew 
is very faulty, but it also contains several 
sections which do not appear in the Hebrew 
Bible. Yet, with all this, the Septuagint 


ae ee en 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 155 


was the Bible practically in use by the New 
Testament writers. 

The lack of knowledge prevailing through 
the Christian centuries as to the Greek sources 
of the New Testament presents a suggestive 
chapter as to the character of biblical inspira- 
tion. Down to the very close of the nine- 
teenth century the Greek of the New Testa- 
ment was looked upon as representing a 
distinct department of Greek letters. Lin- 
guistically and grammatically tested, it clearly 
presents a quite distinct type from anything 
appearing in the classical standards. The 
real fact is that New Testament Greek is not 
properly a literary language at all, and hence 
has not persisted in any Greek literatures, 
aside practically from the New Testament, 
which have come down to us. The advocates 
of “mechanical inspiration” have, in some 
cases, sought to make much of this seeming 
peculiarity in support of their view. They 
have argued that it is both fitting and provi- 
dential that the revelation of the New Testa- 
ment should be clothed in a _ language 
distinctly employed by the Holy Ghost, a 
language free from the contamination and 
profanation of contact with that which has 
been employed in secular writing. Acknowl- 
edgments, however, are due to such eminent 


156 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


specialists as Adolf Deissmann, J. Hope Moul- 
ton, and others for demonstrating the fact 
that New Testament Greek, so far from being 
an isolated and unique language, is simply 
the common language of the people, the 
ordinary vernacular Greek spoken in the 
Greco-Roman divisions of the empire at the 
period of New Testament writings. The 
sand-dunes of Egypt have absolutely yielded 
indubitable proof of this fact. This is really 
a discovery of our own generation, but it 
utterly displaces many of the dogmatic spec- 
ulations which have been rife in ecclesiastical 
history. 

We are familiar with the decree of the 
Council of Trent, meeting in 1546, pronounc- 
ing “anathema” against all who do not accept 
as “sacred and canonical” the Scriptures as 
set forth in the “Old Vulgate Latin Edition.” 
It is well known that the Latin text so highly 
extolled by this Council was an exceedingly 
defective rendering of both the Hebrew and 
the Greek sections of the Bible. Yet this 
was the authorized Bible of the Roman Church 
in the sixteenth century. Concerning this 
notorious action by the Council of Trent, 
Bishop Westcott is authority for saying: ‘“This 
fatal decree, in which the Council, harassed 
by the fear of’ lay criticism and grammarians, 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 157 


gave a new aspect to the whole question of 
the canon, was ratified by fifty-three prelates, 
among whom there was not one German, not 
one scholar distinguished for historical learn- 
ing, not one who was fitted by special study 
of the subject in which the truth could only 
be determined by the voice of antiquity.”’ 


V 


Modern application of the inductive philos- 
ophy to ancient literatures, the Bible included, 
has not only thrown a flood of light upon 
the history and genius of these literatures 
themselves, but with widening knowledge it 
has begotten new convictions with reference 
to the origins and evolution of these literatures. 

The Bible, whatever else it is, is a body of 
literature. As such it can claim no exemption 
from the processes of historic and _ literary 
criticism. It springs from human backgrounds 
and has a human history. It is a legitimate 
function in relation to the Bible, as to all 
other literatures, to make most inquisitorial 
search as to every phase through which this 
literature has come to us. And this, in the 
recent generation especially, is a process through 
which all that can be known of the Bible has 
been subjected to microscopic search. This 
process, it must be admitted, has been revolu- 


158 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


tionary of many traditional views. But it 
would be a most gratuitous and false judg- 
ment to assume that the process has been 
destructive of real biblical values. 

The Bible has been permitted, as never 
before in its history, to speak purely for itself. 
Stripped of a priori constructions, of whim- 
sical glosses, of false dogmatisms, of traditional 
bias, of priestly dictation—the Bible standing 
alone on its intrinsic merits and character is 
seen more than ever to be the peerless record 
of a supreme divine movement in human 
history. While it is a human record, yet it 
is a record mediated for the most part by 
divinely illuminated men. This process yields 
a view which neither obscures nor displaces the 
fact of divine inspiration as connected with 
the Bible record. It classifies the channels of 
inspiration as chiefly two: history and indi- 
vidual illumination. God’s moral and spir- 
itual revealment to men is a historic process 
of which the Bible is a record, but not the 
cause. The history of the Israelitish nation 
is to the period of the Advent, and for that 
period, the most perfect historic disclosure of 
God’s moral purposes for the race. 

But the Bible is as well a gallery of elect 
but divinely inspired men, men of distinctive 
illumination, men divinely raised up and 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 159 


ordained to be the signal moral and spiritual 
guides of mankind. Strip from both the Old 
and the New Testaments the records and 
incidents of such men, and you will have 
largely denuded them of their very glory and 
charm. The inspired man, be he prophet or 
poet, is alone the utterer of the divinest voice 
in history. 

It would be too much, indeed irrational, to 
assume that a human mind, however illu- 
minated, could give a perfect expression to a 
divine experience. And this limitation we 
must apply to the entire biblical record. The 
features that mar the moral perfections of 
the Old Testament are such as belong to the 
limitations of the very people through whom 
God sought to make his chief revelations to 
_ the world. God’s beginnings with Israel found 
its people upon a very low intellectual and 
moral plane. They were both ignorant and 
barbarous. They came from a superstitious 
and idolatrous stock. It required a long 
schooling to impress this people with any 
really worthy conceptions of God himself. 
In their grossness they attributed to Jehovah 
their own low ideals and motives. They were 
idolatrous in habit, a habit which the stern 
discipline of centuries narrowly overcame. If 
one may conceive of God as encountering 


160 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


difficult opposition in the execution of his own 
moral purposes, then his effort to ideally - 
moralize and spiritualize the Hebrew race 
would seem to rank among his most trying 
tasks. 

The fact of man’s inability to perfectly 
translate highest spiritual facts into human 
expression as certainly appears in the records 
of the New Testament as in the Old. The 
chosen disciples were companioned with Christ 
in close intimacy for the space of three years, 
more or less—an ineffable companionship. 
Yet no one can discerningly read the records of 
the four Gospels and escape the impression 
that these disciples themselves were dealing 
with a Character who was always immeas- 
urably above their mental grasp. 

It would be simply to juggle with one’s 
own sanity to assume, as many have done, 
that all parts of the Old Testament are equally 
inspired or equally profitable for ethical in- 
struction. There are in this literature records 
of gross immorality, of low ethical standards, 
of barbarous cruelties, the very attributions to 
God himself of unworthy motives. In reading 
the Old Testament with the inquiry before 
us as to whether we are to accept for our 
moral guidance its teachings and its incidents, 
there is no saner and no better method than 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 161 


to test the quality of these teachings in the 
white light of Christ’s own character and pre- 
cepts. Anything found in the Old Testament 
which cannot stand the challenge of Christ’s 
own standards, may be safely rated as not 
binding upon either Christian conduct or belief. 

If, then, the question should be raised, 
“‘Why the Old Testament at all?” the answer 
may well be twofold: First, it must be frankly 
admitted that much of this record came from 
sources more reflecting imperfect human ideals 
than any real thought of the Divine Mind; 
second, as a matter of education and of his- 
tory, we need the Old Testament just as it 
is to furnish truthfully and vividly the dark 
backgrounds against which God wrought in 
his mission of moral and spiritual self-revelation 
to the race. The Old Testament is not only a 
record of divine revelation to humanity; it is 
also a portrayal of a most limited and defec- 
tive human nature. 

All this prompts to a frank and just recog- 
nition of the very humanness of the Bible 
itself. An overclaim for which accredited 
Christian teachers must be held largely respon- 
sible is in making the Bible throughout a sole 
seat and source of inspiration. A book at 
best can be no more than a record. Inspira- 
tion is a process which can take place only 


162 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


in an intelligent soul. God as the Creator 
and Father of the human spirit has endowed - 
that spirit with aptitude for knowing himself. 
He has made this spirit sensitive to his own 
touch, responsive to the impressions of his 
own nature and perfections. ‘The Bible, at 
its most luminous heights, is but an accom- 
modative attempt to portray through letters 
to the human understanding, to fuse into the 
human moral feeling, mountain-height expe- 
riences had in hours when in great and seeing 
souls there have arisen transfiguring visions. 
The experiences alone made the records possi- 
ble. But the experiences themselves transcend 
all gifts of translation into human language. 
Indeed, the most perfect language of man is 
in itself far inadequate for the reproduction 
of the soul’s highest inspirations. But, just 
as the diamond holds in itself the buried 
sunlight of ages, so these biblical records are 
luminous and inspirational with the divinest 
experiences of the human soul. 


VI 
The distinctive and controlling mission of 
the Bible is religious, spiritual. It is a book 
that relates men directly to God. It is neither 
a textbook nor a treatise of science, but a 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 163 


book which in its historic and literary char- 
acter can be best understood only as scien- 
tifically treated. The spirit and passion of 
science are truth-loving. True science in its 
own sphere can content itself with nothing 
short of demonstrated truth. In the very 
nature of its quest science is often forced to 
revise its own working hypotheses, but it is 
ever in search of demonstrated results, and 
when these are reached it can suffer no defeats. 
The Bible has suffered enormously from a priorz 
constructions. Such constructions have often 
come into direct conflict with scientific demon- 
strations. A dogmatic misconception of the 
Bible, based on processes which have been 
unable to stand against the scrutiny of 
reason, has been the source of much unfor- 
tunate and discreditable controversy with 
and many humiliating theological defeats from 
scientific authorities. The champions of unsci- 
entific dogma by their impertinent attacks 
upon and sullen retreats from the assured 
demonstrations of science, have furnished one 
of the most humiliating chapters in theological 
discussion. Happily, to the credit of modern 
scholarship, and for the advancement of sane 
faith, the Bible is now more and more receiv- 
ing an interpretation which does not array it 
in conflict with scientific fact. 


164 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


VII 

Tf what thus far said is true to fact, it fol- 
lows that the Bible is not inerrant. Critical 
scientific study has yielded a demonstration 
in which all biblical scholarship of acknowl- 
edged standing now concurs, namely, that in 
its literary, historic, and scientific features the 
Bible is neither inerrant nor infallible. For 
the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era 
the Greek Septuagint was the only Old Testa- 
ment in practical use by the Eastern Church, 
while after the fourth century the Latin 
Vulgate was well-nigh exclusively in use in 
the Western, or Roman Church. It is now 
well known that both of these versions were 
exceedingly defective translations of the orig- 
inal languages. So far as original manuscripts 
of both the Old and New Testaments are 
concerned, there is not one of them to-day 
known to be in existence. 

Erasmus, in the Reformation period, gave 
to the church a Greek New Testament which 
was in principal use for nearly or quite three 
full centuries. But he was unable for his needs 
to find a single Greek manuscript covering the 
entire New Testament. He translated as well 
as he could, but really into poor Greek, a part 
of the Apocalypse from the Latin Vulgate. 
He was able to command for his task only 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 165 


eight manuscripts, most of them fragmentary, 
all of them late. He did not have access to 
any of the four great manuscripts since recov- 
ered as belonging to the fourth and fifth 
centuries. 

Since the days of Erasmus, there has been 
a great recovery of New Testament manu- 
scripts, now probably numbering but little, 
if any, less than twenty-five hundred (some 
would place the number much higher), and 
these are being constantly added unto. When 
Westcott and Hort, within living memory, 
after twenty-eight years of concerted toil, 
produced their Greek New Testament, they 
found from manuscripts, all of which they 
faithfully examined, no less than one hundred 
and fifty thousand variations in these products. 
At best, we can form but slight estimate of 
the prodigious task which confronted these 
scholars. For purposes of our present thought 
the foregoing histories are but illustrative. 
For many entirely decisive reasons, which can- 
not be here considered, the conception of an 
infallible and inerrant Scripture has been 
practically abandoned by the entire world of 
competent and accredited biblical scholarship. 

All this, however, is immeasurably far from 
saying that there is not in the Bible, just as 
we have it, a supreme record of God’s self- 


166 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


revelation to mankind. The Bible will always 
remain the peerless religious classic in the 
world’s literature. Whatever imperfections in 
themselves existing manuscripts may reveal, it 
is doubtless true that owing to prodigious 
critical researches, and of a devout and rev- 
erent order, the Christian world is now pos- 
sessed of the nearest approach to the original 
Scriptures that has ever thus far been possible . 
in human history. There is no subject of 
knowledge on which more exhaustive and 
competent labor has been bestowed than in 
the effort of a multitude of scholars to repro- 
duce from all sources the original expression 
and intent of our sacred Scriptures. From 
this combined and distributed labor immeas- 
urably fruitful and valuable results have come, 
placing in the reach of every interested Bible 
reader the most trustworthy records attainable 
of the original records of divine revelation. 


VIitl 


There can be no inclusive and appreciative 
study of the Scriptures which does not reveal 
the progressive development of inspiration. 
A living universe must be a progressing uni- 
verse. The knowledge and life of yesterday 
cannot fill the demands of to-day. Browning 
scans future vistas when he says: “Progress 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION _ 167 


is the law of life.’ Man is not man as yet.” 
And so, our own Holmes, studying the empty 
but pearly seashell by the shore, the cast-off 
home of the growing nautilus which had passed 
out to a better habitation, saw in it the par- 
able of a growing life, and he sang: 
“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 
As the swift seasons roll! 
Leave thy low-vaulted past! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 
Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting 
sea. 
No more poor and gloomy view could be taken 
of God’s world than that it is merely a static 
thing. This would make the universe itself 
of no more worth than a huge fossil. And 
this would be even a more blasting caricature 
upon human life itself. If man is an intel- 
lectual being; if knowledge grows from more 
to more; if he is a moral being, made in God’s 
image, endowed of Divine purpose with possi- 
bilities of an endless Godward growth, then 
he is indeed a pilgrim of the Infinite. He 
must be forever pitching his tents on new 
camping grounds of intellectual and moral 
advancement. 
The development of inspiration in the Scrip- 
tures moves in harmony with this law of 


168 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


progression. We must find ourselves in agree- 
ment with Canon James Maurice Wilson when 
he says: “The final stage of the evolution of 
the soul must be something other than a 
magnified present. It is premature to put a 
limit to our ideals. ‘This was the mistake of 
the Jewish teachers. But Christ showed, and 
Saint Paul saw, a higher truth; and He taught 
us that what his contemporaries held dearest 
was but a parenthesis in the long evolution 
of man, the goal of which we cannot yet 
define. Such parentheses are not the end. 
“The end is not yet.’ ” 

If we could come to the Bible without 
crippling prepossessions, we would have no 
difficulty in understanding that God’s rev- 
elation of himself has been conditioned and 
limited by the moral astigmatisms and the 
undeveloped spiritual faculties of mankind. 
The Spirit of God has undoubtedly wrought 
with the men of all nations. But even in the 
most religious of nations, Israel, the process 
of spiritual development would seem to have 
been so slow and obstructed as to have well- 
nigh tested the Infinite patience. But, even 
so, in the process of time there was developed 
among the distinctive thinkers of this race a 
monotheistic conception so pure, so lofty, so 
majestic, so commanding and inspirational, as 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 169 


justly for all time to rank these thinkers as 
the supreme moral teachers of the ages. 


IX 

It is but a corollary of what has been said 
to assert that inspiration is a continuous and 
universal process in history. Inspiration repre- 
sents the continued life and activities of the 
Spirit in the world. If it were not for the 
vitalizing function of inspiration there could be 
no living church. Humanly speaking, it might 
sometimes almost appear that the diverse 
creeds and practices of the Christian Church 
could mean little less than mutual antagonism 
and self-destruction. It has often been said, 
and perhaps truly, that the internal dissen- 
sions of the church have been a far greater 
menace against its life than the combined 
attacks of all outward foes. But, as _his- 
torically shown, however unfortunate these 
internal disharmonies, it still remains true 
that the spiritual vitalities of the church have 
always been vastly surviving as against all its 
internal symptomatic ailments. The church is 
made up of limited human beings, the in- 
heritors of diverse temperaments and habits, 
men often of limited intellectual vision and 
of eccentric prejudices; these and kindred 
limitations inevitably inhering in average hu- 


170 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


man nature are enough to account for the 
introduction of unnumbered unideal things in 
the life of the church. But despite all this it 
graciously appears that no branch of the 
chureh universal is entirely destitute of spir- 
itual inspirations. 

The same is true of the Christian Scriptures. 
The letter of the New Testament is not the 
Spirit. At best it is but the channel along 
which the living spiritual message is conveyed. 
Tt is no more the Spirit than are the banks 
of a river the river itself. It is the inspiring 
Spirit in the continuous life of the church 
that gives to the New Testament its voice of 
continuous spiritual authority. Without the 
continuous presence in the church of the 
inspiring Spirit the New Testament would long 
since have disappeared as a dead fragment 
from literary history. 

It is the mission of inspiration to give an 
ever-widening vision to the church, ever- 
enlarging boundaries of thought to the mean- 
ing and scope of Christianity itself. It is the 
function of present-day inspired seers to ascribe 
a rightful dominance of Christianity over well- 
nigh innumerable spheres which seemed to lie 
hidden behind the horizons of early Christian 
writers. Christianity, to most discerning vision, 
is more and more seen as the one divinely 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 171 


regal, as the one all-subordinating, realm of 
the universe. Christ did not deal with sys- 
tems. He uttered no word in condemnation of 
slavery; he did not lay down a system of 
economics; he uttered no specific for the 
government of corporate capital or the labor 
union; he announced no law for the equitable 
division of natural wealth, for the housing 
of the aged, the sick and the unfortunate. 
He spoke no word concerning woman suffrage. 
All this is but to say that our present world 
faces innumerable problems the solution of 
which requires application of highest ethical 
principles, and yet questions on which Christ 
gave no specific utterance. Christ in himself 
is inexhaustible. He awaits the needs of a 
given age before he manifests himself for those 
needs. It is thus impossible that any one age 
shall fully comprehend, or exhaust, his poten- 
tialities. The problems of coming civilizations 
may be greatly multiplied as compared with 
those of the present, but there can come no 
time, no social or moral exigency, for which 
Christ in some new manifestation shall not 
prove himself Master. Christ in all the future 
ages must ever remain the Emanuel, God 
with men. 

The Spirit of Truth is ever opening upon 
human vision new fields of knowledge. This 


172 LIFE’S WESTWARD WINDOWS 


is as true in moral and spiritual as in physical 
and intellectual realms. It is the task of the 
Christian seer and teacher of to-day to coor- 
dinate all truth, whether scientific or phil- 
osophical, into harmonious relations with 
Christian thought. It is thus inevitable that 
the perspective of Christian thinking will call 
for a constantly enlarging and hence, in ~ 
minor relations certainly, a changing order of 
rational and spiritual perception. The king- 
dom of Christ will always be in need of Spirit- 
inspired and Spirit-guided teachers. 

Finally, I content myself with the state- 
ment, the conviction, that the church will 
never come to a dogmatic and adequate 
definition of Divine Inspiration. One might 
as well undertake to count the sands upon 
the seashore, or take a numbering of the 
spring-time growths, as to endeavor to crib 
and confine within the limits of human def- 
inition the processes of Divine Inspiration. 
If, as Mrs. Browning has said, “Earth’s 
crammed with heaven, and every common 
bush afire with God,” then, if man’s insight 
were such that he could paint the very globe 
with wings, still he must ever live within the 
receding horizons of God’s greater thought. 
All this, however, does not mean that fu- 
ture spiritual teaching by the church is to 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 173 


be of a chaotic or unregulative sort. The 
Spirit-inspired teacher, tantamount to inspired 
prophet and apostle, will always be in com- 
mission as interpreter and guide of the King- 
dom. We must distinctively emphasize, how- 
ever, that not every one who assumes—and it 
may be intensely assumes—the role of spiritual 
teacher, is therefore a safe leader of the church. 
There are people of most intense convictions, 
of zealous activities, even of fiery conscien- 
tiousness, who, as measured by the standards 
of a “sound mind,” of “sound words,” and of 
“sound doctrine’—phrases emphatically em- 
ployed in Saint Paul’s writings—are utterly 
unbalanced persons. The navigation of an 
ocean steamship might as wisely be com- 
mitted to a captain and crew of insane sailors 
as to commit the direction of the church to 
men of sincere but fanatical faith. There are 
zealous and conscientious men in the church 
who, if their voices were to be accepted as 
final authority, would pervert the best religious 
teaching into something no better than so 
much theological absurdity. 

Such teachers have been in evidence in all 
ages of the church. They were disturbers of 
the ancient prophets. ‘They were more trouble- 
some to Saint Paul than even his thorn in the 
flesh. The historic creeds were largely evolved 


174 LIFES WESTWARD WINDOWS 


for the purpose of steadying and protecting 
the church against such erratic teaching. It 
is to be expected that here and there will arise 
unbalanced enthusiasts, unsafe visionaries, mis- 
guided and misguiding teachers. 

The consensus of sane and_ illuminated 
Christian mind must ever be the chief reliance 
of the church for a rational interpretation of 
the fact and methods of inspiration. The 
human rational spirit is the sole organ through 
which God manifests himself to the world. 
In the aggregate of Spirit-illumined mind in 
the church there will always be found a saving 
and practically infallible sanity of thought. 
The great body of prophetical Christian knowl- 
edge and conviction will ever move within 
the lines of rational and defensible truth. 
The Spirit of Truth himself, ever working in 
the rational thought of believing men, will 
always yield a sufficient and only safeguard 
of Christian doctrine. This is not to say 
that in minor matters there may not always 
exist differing constructions. But more and 
more with advancing and clearing Christian 
thought there will prevail the sane rule, “In 
essentials, unity; in non-essentials. liberty; in 
all things, charity.” This, through all coming 
ages, will prove the one infallibility of the 
Christian Church. It will mean a church com- 


A STUDY IN INSPIRATION 175 


posed of a universal priesthood of believers, so 
Spirit-guided through all panoramic changes of 
thought, across all new territories of discovery, 
as to make itself intellectually alert and pro- 
gressive, safe and sane in its faith, world-con- 
quering in its spirit. 





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GAYLORD PRINTED IN U.S.A. 








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